 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. Our guest today is Raleigh Potachnik and this is Smart Business Moves. Hey Riley. Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. What you eat, Liz? Where what? What are you eating? What makes you think I'm eating? We all want to know. All right. I'm eating cheese risks and pistachios. Now you know. Not the not the cheese puffs. No, you know, those are different. These are just real cheese. That's all they are. There's nothing else in them. Okay. So they're healthy ish. I did eat some little tomatoes right before I ate those. So, you know, I can't can't pass up in the little tomatoes too. Not a bad snack going on there. I'm so hungry today. I think today is the first day that I've actually felt like truly like almost well again. How long is that day? A month and a half? Hmm. Maybe. I mean, then a long time. Since I got back from your place, Tom. Don't blame me. I am blaming you. Oh, longer. So yeah, since end of April. So two months. Yeah. So you caught something in in Charleston, huh? I did catch something in Charleston. Got sick. Got really sick. I remember I had the ear infection and that nasal infection. And then when I came back from Vegas, I had a fever again. So I'm like, what? What? Some stuff just doesn't want to go away. Just one wants to linger. I'm still coughing, but I feel so much better. I can like, I can think again too. I feel more normal. All right. So what's going on with you, Tom? I see you're like all, all growing out here. That going on for, for a while, I guess. Hits and spurts. I think there was a time when I woke up and I was still half asleep and I was trying to trim it and I didn't have the right thing on. And I basically jacked it out. So I had to shave again. Kind of, but, you know, I am positive that if I was a man, I would have some kind of facial hair because shaving is just not all that comfy. It's not that easy. Yeah. Riley, you're like, yeah. Yeah. Maybe I just haven't gotten to the point where it's grown very long quickly, but yeah, it just, I guess it just becomes part of the routine, I suppose. I guess. Yeah. I don't even know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I have no idea. So what are we talking about? Are we talking about grooming and eating today? Yeah. This is going to be like the best podcast ever. Okay. So let's get down to business here. This is marketing and sales. Okay. Riley, I know you've got a lot going on in that area. You help people with a number of different products in the digital world websites. You've got, you've got to be here. Why don't you tell us what do you have going on in the marketing and sales arena? Yeah. So I mean, it's definitely kept me busy for the last couple of years. I've had rocket thruster, which is my website design, my website design freelancer business. And I've worked with Liz. I'm still working with Liz on the number of projects she's, she's had, but for the most part I'm working with many of the home service businesses that includes the green industry, house cleaning companies like that to help create a website that doesn't just look good, but also has the strategy behind it. How do you, how do you make sure that when somebody lands on your website, they're actually going to move forward and reach out to you. So you're generating leads. That's what I've been working on for the past couple of years. And then one of the newest additions to kind of my lineup here, the lineup of products and services that I have is a product called schedule talk. And this kind of work hand in hand with my website stuff, just kind of talking through some of the ideas and strategies for how you generate more leads and how do you get more people that actually follow through and contact you, not only from your website, but really any of the marketing materials that you're running. And kind of, so schedule talk is a software product to help businesses start text messaging to implement text messaging to effectively manage incoming text messages. And the point of that being that oftentimes when a business wants to start texting, they may have to use a personal number, which you can come up with a variety of different reasons why that's not a good thing to have your, especially when your personal numbers out there for anybody to see. But also something that I hear is when it comes to texting, people want almost an immediate response. And that's just, that's a pain in the butt, especially when you have a variety of different things going on in your schedule. So schedule talk, it's the goal is to help you manage these things. And with the software product, you can implement automation and your team can get involved. You just have a number of things. And that's kind of worked hand in hand with the website stuff since things are moving towards a more mobile, a more mobile friendly way of doing things. And people want to text you. That's the biggest idea. They want something fast. They want it so free. And that's the idea behind schedule talk. So, so Riley, the, the texting, one of the things that you said is that people don't like is that you have to be like on all the time. You have to, you know, respond. So the schedule talk handle the call about texting or. To an extent. So the, one of the most recent features that was added to schedule talk or that I added to schedule talk was some form of automation. So if somebody texts you, it'll follow up or send a response back to them, letting them know that at the very least they've received your message and then a team member will get back to you. But as kind of an add on to that, it will also, if they send you, say you're running a promotion, a house cleaning promotion where they would get like 20% off their first service. If you, you can create a little keyword inside the software where if they text you, let's just keep it simple. House cleaning, if they text house cleaning to that phone number, it'll start asking them questions. So you can almost pre-qualify that lead. You can get their name, their email, their, the services that they're interested in. You can get all of this different information that normally wouldn't get from just a simple text message that somebody may send you. It'll ask all of these questions before your team ever has to get involved. Wow. So if they text, is it just the like word, you know, house cleaning or if it's a sentence, hey, I think I'd like to have some information about house cleaning services with that, then trigger that. Yeah. So right now it's just based on the word that you create. It's a tag. Okay. Yes. Yes. So I envision it mostly for promotions or for something like social media where people can get distracted really easily. And you want to just create a one really simple called action for them to take, to kind of move forward on. And they would text that one word like house. You would tell your audience just text house clean and some number. Exactly. And it would start that conversation. But there's a lot of improvement that could be made there like, like what you said, kind of reading into that, that, that initial message that they sent you and being able to identify, okay, what's the intent of this message and then trigger triggering an automated conversation from there. There are a lot of ways that it can branch off and kind of become really powerful for a business trying to just automate everything. Yeah. So right down the road, you'll throw some AI in there and it'll, you know, you won't have to respond at all. The application will handle the dialogue for you. Yeah. That's, that's the ultimate goal when you can start having a basically an automated system that's kind of powered by AI where almost your, your office team doesn't need to be completely involved. Basically the AI just kind of handles the conversation and you just show up and do the work. That's the ultimate goal, but there's still a lot of time before the AI out there without developing a hugely complicated system. It's going to take some time, but that's where the world's heading. It seems like. Yeah, it sure does. Doesn't seem like it's going back the other way. That's for darn sure. Yeah. I don't see people all of a sudden saying, hey, can you just call me? I just rather chat about it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's a lot. That's a big reason why people are kind of moving in the direction of texting. They use it all the time. It's simple, but they also don't have to hop on the phone with a business, whether that be that they're worried about getting stuck on the phone with the sales person kind of getting pushed in directions they may not want to go in. But a lot of the times when they see your marketing materials, whether it be your company vehicles, your website, your, your ads on Facebook, a lot of the times they don't have time to give you a call on the spot. And if they could just send you a quick text, you're going to get a lot more responses from that because they don't have to carve out a portion of their day to hop on the phone with your team. So I think that's a big, a big reason why a lot of, a lot of people are moving in that direction versus phone calls. It's that simplicity behind it. Yeah. So is the texting app, is that something that they would, a company would, would, would put on their website? If you want more information, you can text us at, it would have a number or the people send it out email campaigns were all the ways that you can encourage your candidate, your, your, your market to our customers really to text with you. Yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do this. I mean, the most simple way is just taking that phone number that you have from, from the, from schedule talk or, or if you have a phone number that you've text enabled inside a schedule talk, you can just simply put that number on your website and let people know that they can text you. That's the, that's the most basic form of promote, promoting your text messaging and that you're accepting text messages, but from a standpoint of getting creative, there are a variety of ways that you can do this. You can, like we talked about earlier, implement that keyword feature where somebody texts you, and it starts that conversation. That's one way that you can do it. But you can also use this from a standpoint of just thinking about what your customers are doing throughout the day, what's easiest for them and identifying places to put your phone number. So it could be on, on door hangers, it could be on your company vehicles, places where they just aren't going to have time to, to call you or to email you. That's where it makes sense to kind of put that phone number because it just simplifies that call to action and it's going to make it easier for people to reach out because the last thing that you want to do is that complicated step and you not get contact information at all or not get the lead. Is the number, could the number be confused with a number that you could try to have a voice conversation with? It could be. And I think that comes down to the wording so you can have a separate textable number. You can set that up inside a schedule talk or if you have a phone number that you're already using, most of the time you can text enable that basically just turning your callable phone number and adding SMS functionality to it and have text go to schedule talk and then your phone calls go to wherever they, they've been going. So with just a simple textable number there is that chance that somebody tries to call it. But for the most part, if you're putting it on your website, if you're using it in your marketing materials, it's good to just let them know that they can text this number. And that's partly, part of the reason why is most people don't know that they can text you. So if you're clear about text us at this number, that'll help people start texting. So as a cleaning company, if I had this additional channel and using it properly, are you finding that companies are improving their sales that they're actually generating more revenue by using texting? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, just from a standpoint of generating leads, that's a, texting plays a big role in that. But also when it comes down to turning that lead into a paying customer, that's also a huge thing because if you look at kind of the stats behind texting and I have a few notes here because I figured this may come up. So oftentimes email, if you're trying to reach out to them by email, it's hard to get a hold of them because when you think about your customer, they aren't spending much much time in their email. They're on their phone. They're on social media. There's just no big reason why they're on their email unless it's work-related. I have people, Riley, I have people that will send me an email, then send me a text telling me they just sent me an email. I've done that. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that could happen. And you know, it may, I don't see texting at the moment completely phasing out email and phone calls because some people do want to do it that way. Some people may want to hop on the phone. So texting is kind of an alternative to these things that you should push and just give people the option to do it. And I would expect that most people would go up on the option of texting you. I think somewhere there was some crazy stat like 70 to 80% of people would rather text a business compared to call them. It's something crazy. Yeah. From a standpoint of yourself, if you just ask yourself the question of if I was looking for a company to take care of something around my home, would I rather call them and potentially get stuck on hold or maybe not get a response at all? Or would I rather send them a text and move on with my day until they get back to me? And that's kind of where that 70 to 80% comes from is people just want to send you a text and be done with it until your team gets back to them. And that's kind of the importance of texting. I think there was a trying to illustrate kind of the value of texting. I was going to look at some of these stats here. So in terms of open rate, you look at some of the most common things that you get in the emails. If you think about email in the open rate, it's somewhere in the ballpark of maybe 20%. People will open that email and respond to it. So around 20%. When you look at... Sorry, I mixed some things up there. So if you look at text messaging and we'll compare it to phone calls here for a second, if you look at the response rate compared to phone calls. A lot of that comes down to people just don't recognize your number. So their skin ignore it. They're not going to pick up the phone for a random number. I've ignored plenty of random phone calls. Do people pick up their phone for random numbers now? I don't know that that's a thing. Yeah, I mean it may be... It's never a good call. It's somebody trying to like train us just to completely ignore those phone calls. The only reason why I would see any of us picking up a random number is we're expecting a call. That's the only reason why I would pick up the phone for a random number. Maybe I haven't added that person as a contact yet in my phone and I'm expecting something, but beyond that, I'm ignoring it. And then for email, we were talking about open rate. The open rate for email is in the ballpark of 20%. The open rate for text messaging is in the ballpark of like 95 to 98%. I mean, even if it's a text message where I get the little snippet of what's inside the text message, I may still open it even if it's a promotional and just see what's going on in there. That's ridiculous. It catches me. I have this window cleaning. I'm pulling it up right now, and it says it's in the SMS businesses. Why do I have to open it up every time? The thing from Dix, it says 50% off now at Dix. Why do I still open it? I don't want to use Dix, but I'm opening it. If time is a currency, text messaging is relatively free. Phone calls are expensive. Whether you're making a call or when you're receiving a call, it's like, crap, I'm getting a phone call. Either way, it's like I'm giving up time and whatever it was I was doing, I can't do it anymore, but text usually can keep doing whatever you're doing and do the text in the same way. Email, this was funny. I was listening to a podcast this morning talking about the movie You've Got Mail and this is probably before your time, Riley, but Liz, you might remember this when America Online and the whole email was relatively new and you would log in and you'd be disappointed. It's like, crap, I didn't get any new email. That's true. I do remember that. Yeah. It was a big deal. It was a big deal if you got an email. You're excited, but you know what, I think there's also a I think there's a control issue also like I feel in control of texting like I can, I feel I have no problem not texting somebody and opening or not opening, I feel like I have 100% control. When the phone rings, I instantly feel like they've got control. I'm like, I don't know. What do they want to talk about? What am I going to get stuck having to listen to? No, I just don't want to do it. I feel like they have control, though. But texting, I completely feel like I'm in control. It's kind of ridiculous, but definitely a control issue. Yeah, I don't know where that quite comes from, but you've definitely seen bad or negative reviews out there where somebody's complaining that they didn't pick up the phone when I tried to call them. You've definitely seen those kind of reviews, so maybe that's where it comes from. And texting is so new that most businesses don't do it quite yet, which also opens up the opportunity for you to kind of get a leg up on on the businesses around you and just giving people a really easy way to reach out to you rather than everybody else. But yeah, I don't know quite where that comes from in terms of kind of being more okay, not responding to a text compared to you not picking up the phone right away. I wonder if it's age related to, you know, because we always picked up the phone when we were numb. That was, uh, that was you always picked up the phone. It was kind of like a chord. Yeah. It was kind of like email. You were happy to get a call. Hey, the phone's ringing. Yeah, it was good. It was a great story. Yeah, people would literally run for the phone. Yeah. So, you know, obviously there's some advantages to texting, but, you know, in the spirit of, you know, marketing and sales, this is more of a, I presume a sales activity to do well, explain. I mean, what are all the ways that I can use texting to generate more revenue and you know, have you seen results you have any data that kind of speaks to, you know, this is how you can put more money in the bank if you use this technology properly. Yeah. And I don't have any case studies quite yet. It's like the number one thing and I'm trying to work on putting together these case studies to better illustrate this, since it is still a very new thing that not a lot of businesses have experimented with, those case studies will be really important. So right now, I'm basically just relying on this data and what kind of other people have seen out there. That's kind of what I'm relying on right now. But I mean, when you kind of going back to what we've talked about texting is hugely important for the lead generation in the sales and you can use this in a number of different ways not just from a standpoint of letting somebody text you but also from the standpoint of following up with somebody and you can also use this for promotional purposes although you have to be a little bit careful here because these cold text messages where nobody or where the group of people didn't want you to text them you can get into some hot water there and the first thing is if you're not using a software product it's important to let them know that they can unsubscribe if you're running these cold text messaging campaigns where the person may not have subscribed to you texting them have some way if you're not using a software product to let them know that they can unsubscribe from your whatever list that you put together with a software product like schedule talk it'll auto add that unsubscribe feature so that you aren't getting trapped in kind of a tough spot where people may be reporting you for now practice with text messaging you just want to avoid that but you can use text messaging also for upselling and that's it's something else that you can look at where one good example that I've tried to talk about more and more is just as you're servicing somebody's home as you're cleaning somebody's home keep an eye out for areas that you can help them so let's just take for example you're cleaning somebody's home and you notice their windows are super spotty just super dirty and that's not part of the service that you're there for but you offer window cleaning so one way that you can do or one way that you can upsell that client on say a window cleaning service is snap a picture of that super dirty window and send them a quick text hey we noticed your windows are incredibly dirty next visit and get these cleaned up for you that's one way that you can just super informal just send them a click and that'll go one of two ways I think if that could go badly too like who the heck do you think you are yeah maybe so it's an experiment work but that's one way you can use texting to upsell people upsell existing clients so from upselling from following up and making sure that your messages are being read and maybe re-engaging stagnant leads who maybe aren't responding to your emails or aren't responding to your phone calls texting can help get the ball rolling with those leads who just aren't quite responsive now kind of stepping away from each generation you can use texting for a variety of different things as well like customer service if somebody's just got a quick question they may just want to send you a quick text get that quick answer and be done with it rather than having to monitor their email or get on the phone if they can just send you a text and get an answer that's where customer service could be beneficial as well in using texting now something that I something else that you can play around with is hiring job candidates the tough part is here with job applications you have a lot of information that you need to collect about that person but if you are trying to schedule an interview if you're trying just to keep the conversation rolling with that job applicant maybe doing a text conversation rather than email conversation or the occasional phone call where you have to call them to get some more information maybe it's better to just keep that conversation quick have a text conversation with them and just collect that information when you need it and schedule interviews that way that would be another way that you can use texting but all the time I'm focusing on the lead in sales which is kind of what we're talking about in this video here that's a lot of information when it comes to recruiting though often times that's a marketing and sales activity as well your market is the potential employee I remember reading something from a recruiting standpoint when you're trying to get someone to engage in an interview text often times can be the best channel especially for like cleaning technicians hourly hire type positions a larger percentage of your candidates are going to be a lot more comfortable working off of their phone and texting than email some don't really even there's a lot of people out there that really don't even bother much with email yeah and us as business owners we may have the perspective of everybody uses email because email is a very dominant thing that I use kind of running the website stuff and schedule talk now so it's easy for me to assume that my clients, the people that I'm working with also use email but sometimes we find that that's not necessarily the case so for job applications and hiring just being able to hold that quick conversation over text where that's probably the main thing that they're using that's great especially when you think about they've likely applied to a number of different businesses in the area they're not just applying to you so being able to quickly get your message across to them and hold that conversation rather than waiting for them to respond and maybe them having a more efficient conversation with another company and you end up losing them there's just some issues there and texting will help speed that process up because you're not waiting for them to respond to an email it seems like our industry is a good one for this as well because texting tends to have a more casual feel to it and people think of texting as more casual I think it would be weird to or maybe for now right as I thought it well maybe not if I reached out to an attorney and I got a text back I said hey you know hey Mrs. Trotter or hey Liz I see you're looking for an attorney would you beat up or something like that it's just weird but I feel like with our industry it kind of lends itself to a more casual form of especially with the employees of communication yeah not positive but I think so and I think you're pretty correct about that where right now with who we're generally serving which is the homeowner I think text messaging is hugely important to them because generally they're going to be texting throughout the day so like a lawyer or someone like that email still may be the best place to reach out there it's maybe more of a professional situation where email makes more sense so that's I think texting in the homeowner's mind is the way they want to do it although if you think about commercial rather than residential I think even there will be a pretty critical part from commercial because you're talking to another business owner it comes down to understanding who you talk to and who your client is and right now for those residential house cleaning companies window cleaning lawn care landscaping those who are working with residential that's where I see the most opportunity with texting but you know even professional services law medical if you have an appointment I believe they use text for reminders I get a text reminder and actually my last appointment I did get a text from my doctor as a follow up 24 hours later yeah it was just a quick and she used my first name too Liz just checking in to make sure that everything's going okay did you get your prescription filled or filled I was like dang that's nice and it looked like it was coming from my doctor and the concern is that they send you an email is it going to wind up in spam or are you going to wind up deleting it with the other 150 emails that you know you've gotten in the last hour and really back to the control thing I mean using it with our customers I do think that the customers also feel like they have a level of control like okay it's easy I'm in charge of whatever we're going to talk about and how much I want to talk about if I don't want to text anymore I can always say hey I'll just give you a call or hey can you send that to me by email every once in a while I will ask someone actually just yesterday I was looking for a quote for something and we were texting and I said hey do you mind sending me a quote by email so I'll have that in there and I can go look at it and read it at my leisure they can get all the detail you know so I think there's a time and a place but the chatting by text made that much easier too yeah were you about to say something Tom yeah I was just going to add on to that where I think we talked about this a little earlier this texting thing isn't meant to completely replace some of the things that people are using right now it's to give people the option to text you when that's the most convenient thing to them but like you're saying there is no way to play time in a place for email and phone call so scrapping that side of your business is not what we're trying to get across here it's giving your clients, the people who are interested in the marketing that you're running the ability to quickly send you a text and hold that conversation in a place they spend the most time using throughout the day so that's the main idea behind texting you know what I would really like you know how when you see a phone number usually you'll see in front of the phone number like a C for their cell or P for personal or they need an X in front of the phone number if it's a texting number so I know I can text so I could just text I would always know I can text that because it is frustrating if I text a number and then I get the message back that says you're texting a landline well who has a landline what is that is that a thing anymore like stop lazy landlines it is a thing it is a thing and you know we do a lot of texting and made central and we get trouble tickets it's like hey my texts aren't going through and it's like you're trying to text something to somebody's landline landline so Ronald you mentioned something earlier that I think would probably be a good idea for us to spend a little bit of time on Rose we're talking about using text one of the things you can do with it is marketing so you can have like a list of prospects and you can reach out to them I know something that companies often do in the cleaning world and the residential cleaning world is if you have a last minute cancellation you can send a text to a bunch of prospects and say hey I have an opening this morning who wants that but there's some rules around that and I guess some legal consequences if you don't follow them and sometimes us entrepreneurs we don't pay as close attention on those things as we should could you kind of give us an education there yeah and I will say I'm still reading up on all this stuff the main thing is just making sure that if you are sending out these bulk text messages be sure that you have that unsubscribed feature on it make sure you're clearly stating that they can unsubscribe from this automated message whenever they please and that's critical I think that came through that was a big rule change when GDPR was pushed in Europe which was a big privacy update for a lot of GDPR would you say? GDPR I forget what the acronym stands for but basically the ruling was that all of these big technology companies had to very clearly disclose what kind of information they're collecting and how users can unsubscribe from automated emails and automated in this case automated text messaging all of that kind of stuff it gave more rights to the user and how they control their data online so GDPR general data protection regulation that's purely a European thing right? and though you're seeing a lot of stuff roll over to the US it may not be called GDPR but California is very heavy on their restrictions with things like automated messages so you just kind of have to understand generally it's safe practice whenever you're sending these automated messages just give them a way that they can unsubscribe that's the safest bet so in the text it gives them an option and it's typically how would I refresh my memory what does the copy typically tell you at the end if you want to opt out you enter a code? yeah so it could be I forget the exact text that I append or that schedule talk appends to the end but it's something basic like if you would like to stop receiving messages from us text stop and that would unsubscribe yeah okay so when they text stop then you won't ever send them another text so when they text stop it will unsubscribe them from your bulk text messaging now if they sent you a text message in the future and you were holding a personal one on one conversation it wouldn't stop those messages from going through because they requested you to have this conversation with them but from a standpoint of sending bulk messages again you would need to receive their approval before you can start doing that yeah it complicates a lot of things but from a general perspective being safe with the law and not getting stuck in maybe a lawsuit it's very important to kind of follow these these fairly basic rules but just mainly giving them the option to unsubscribe when they want these and the majority of mine do not have that yeah and that's if you hadn't texted them first which I assume you didn't that's an issue that's something that they can get in trouble for yeah I can't imagine I texted most of these places first if they type in stop and they opt out and say Mrs. Jones opts out of your bulk email and then a week from now there's an issue just with her that you want to reach out to her and you pick up your phone and you text her are you in trouble for doing that if it's a personal message directed for her and it's related to her situation you're okay with doing that but if you send her another promotional message that she may have no interest in at all and doesn't really apply to her situation that's kind of the issue again what could happen to me if I did that it's uh there's a variety for the most part if it's a small scale bulk message you're not going to be in too much trouble maybe a small fine but for the most part for the most part for the size business of a house cleaning company that most people may have in watching this stream here it may not be too big of an issue but you can turn to something difficult or something something more challenging if people start reporting these messages to maybe major government organizations so I don't know the exact punishments to these things but generally maybe a fine something along those lines maybe what's expected I mean like on the merchant accounts I credit card processing there's laws in place that are pretty stiff yeah that's fake yeah and where you see the most trouble is when you get up to and this doesn't necessarily apply to house clean but when you get up to where you're bulk messaging millions of people at a time for say large retailers or larger companies that's where you're going to land in big trouble if you're sending out these massive amounts of text messages and you don't have this unsubscribed button or you don't have this like Walmart or somebody yeah if you don't give that user that end user an opt out and you're a large company large being you're sending millions of text messages that's where the government's going to come after you try and make an example but I don't think you're going to find that with the size of the companies that that I have or that many people watching this video or have I don't just be clear y'all he's not he's not advocating that you go ahead and do it right yeah yeah regardless of the size of the business that you have follow these same rules that companies follow that's the safest way to operate yeah and if we're using schedule talk we really don't have to worry about it because these are features that are built into your product right yep so if you are running say bi-weekly text campaigns and somebody unsubscribes the next the next week that you send that campaign it won't send a text message to that person because they're unsubscribed in the system so we handle the the the inclusion of that unsubscribed message and then for the next batch we filter out all of those people who unsubscribed so you don't get in trouble I have a question about schedule talk specifically so if I were to sign up for a schedule talk right I got a hold of you and I was like okay sign me up do I have to now come up with promotions am I deciding how to use it are you going to say here are our top three ways to use schedule talk like like what what what would what would happen coming about that yeah so right now right now I don't have a templates in place but schedule talk is still small enough where I'm pretty much working hand in hand with the people who sign up for schedule talks I'm gonna help you get this thing set up and help you come up with ideas for how you can use it so I'm working with you to kind of put this thing together and actually get it implemented so I'm working on putting templates together for to be accessible but right now it'll be a little bit of a partnership and me working with them to set everything up how they want it so the people that currently are using schedule talk Riley what do you think the most popular thing that people use it for is it comes down to what we talked about earlier in the video which was giving people the ability to text something that schedule talk does and there is plenty of room for us to grow or for schedule talk to grow here is at some point or over time the goal of schedule talk is to be a place where you're managing all sorts of messages so at the moment text messages is a big key item in schedule talk you also receive your facebook messages in schedule talk so people are using schedule talk to manage these two platforms which tend to be the platforms that most people want to use to message a business because it's the thing again that people spend the most time on so one thing they're doing is putting it on their website so that they can now have easy conversations with mostly leads it sounds like that they can then hopefully turn into sales correct yeah yeah and I don't want to make it just sound like it's just a lead generation platform it's more of a communication platform to help these businesses send and receive text messages and get their team involved where if you have an office team or a number of office staff members they can get into schedule talk as well and start helping you managing the inflow and outflow of these text messages and facebook messages so you're using a lot of them then for like customer service customer service generation following up with existing clients that sort of thing but you mentioned website and I'm just kind of thinking about the workflow and all of this and either people are texting you or you're texting them and whichever side of the equation you're on that whole relationship probably started with somebody going to your website to find out something about you so that's a whole other part of this as well and I don't want to let the hour get away from us without taking advantage of talking about website design a little bit I know that you would do that for a lot of home service businesses and hey it's 2022 you know we've seen a lot of change here in the last few years but what are some of the latest trends you're seeing in website design and you know what what do we need to know is cleaning business owner yeah so I think if we kind of touch back on what we've been talking about we've talked about when somebody's ready to text message you but to get them to that point they need to learn some information about your business to actually get them kind of comfortable and confident and actually reaching out to you and getting them to believe that you're the right company to kind of solve their challenges they may be facing so ultimately that comes down to just as a general foundation for the website that's answering their questions what questions are the things that they need to address before they feel comfortable with you building that trust with them with testimonials pictures and then that kind of gives them a foundation in kind of an idea of what kind of company you are and how they should feel about you if you don't answer their questions if they don't see testimonials or any way that would build trust with them you're not going to get that text message because they don't see the value in reaching out to you so that's kind of the key foundation but in terms of trends for this has been going on for a little while so I don't know if I consider it a trend but it's that that movement towards mobile first focusing on your website on mobile devices is the first thing when you're developing a website because most people coming to your website they're going to be on their phone which is why text messaging is also becoming critical because everything's done on the phone nowadays so when you're designing a website when you're developing a website to kind of move the needle for your business make sure that when somebody goes to your website on their phone everything looks good text isn't falling off the page your images aren't aren't too small or maybe too big just make sure everything looks good so that people going through your website on their mobile device get the information that they need and you're not communicating the wrong first impression with a broken mobile website that's kind of the main thing what I really try to focus on is getting that mobile site right and then that will translate to the desktop or we'll say the computer website that's a lot of what we're trying to focus on right now websites more mobile friendly now that it's 2022 and everybody's using their phone what roughly do you have any idea what percentage of website traffic to home service companies is coming through a mobile device who nowadays it's it's definitely over half so I would think for a homeowner that is primarily on their phone you could be 60 70% of that traffic coming through it may differ but I think nowadays just as a general average for most industries you may be seeing over 50% of that traffic being mobile I believe you are right I bet it could be even higher than that it seems like it would be I'm betting it's 60 maybe pushing 70% yeah it seems like it just keeps growing by the day that percentage for the last for the last week castlekeepers.com 83% is mobile 4% tablet 12.5% desktop not even surprising either the world is just moving so forward towards mobile devices that 83% makes total sense people are just on their phone all the time they take it with them wherever they go it's right there so whenever somebody needs to look something up like finding a house cleaning company they're going to do it on their phone yeah totally what about SEO do you do anything with SEO in regards to the website how does that play in Riley yep so SEO is kind of a big piece of what I do it's I would say I have a small service offering I primarily focus on the website and SEO is a big portion of that okay so is that like in product as you're designing and building the website or is that like I know there's a lot of a lot of companies that do the ongoing service where they're building backlinks and writing blog posts I mean do you guys do that too yeah so when we are designing and building a website SEO is something that we do in terms of like ongoing that's something that we also do as well just keeping up with the SEO and making sure everything stays good because this thing it needs to be updated you need to show Google that the website is staying maintained that's something that they look for in terms of kind of taking on just SEO projects right now I'm kind of trying to limit that just because things are so busy right now I'm mainly just taking on full service projects but SEO for those full service projects which include just designing and building the website along with the SEO it's a SEO is a huge part of that making sure that we're not just designing a website that looks good but it's actually showing up so it's an important aspect for any website because one of the things that we see with website design that more and more companies are moving from just a lead capture form and they're doing like online booking where you know they integrate with an app that will capture a credit card run a credit card say hey we'll be at your house next Tuesday to claim do you see that becoming almost an expectation with the customers you're working with in website design the ability to kind of self-book is that what you were thinking right where the whole sales process is processed through scheduling the first job and processing a payment is done through their consumer website yeah and Marcus Sheridan he has the book they ask you answer and he does a number of conferences he has started talking about this exact thing the self-service aspect of a website and I think this may still be fairly industry specific it's probably growing and I think house cleaning is probably a big place where this can be implemented successfully where if you have a tool that can kind of identify okay what are your availabilities maybe what times can they book and maybe it will auto give them a price that they can just go ahead and pay for and get that house cleaning on the calendar that is absolutely something where that's definitely somewhere where the world is moving where they don't have to get in touch with the business or with the company they just go to the website they pick the day of the week that they want to have their house cleaned okay it's done that is the easiest thing and you know as the world yeah as the world moves further and further down the line of automation you can't go wrong with implementing a tool like that I had to have my washing machine the boot was broken and so I went on to appliance repair and the one that let me book it on their website yeah they got my business and I I didn't even really this the truth I didn't even care how much it was going to cost I was just like oh good I mean they did give me the price and everything but as long as it was within the realm of what made sense to me I was going with it because I wasn't going to what I'm going to call somebody no and for what because you can get five other quotes and maybe save yourself you know some modest amount of money but it's door to comparison to all the extra time and calories you had to burn to get those extra quotes as long as it's in that normal realm what I'm kind of expecting I'm going to go yeah it's amazing how much we value simplicity if you can just give that end user just the most simple way of booking you're going to get a lot more people reaching out to you that way they're going to they're going to say I don't want to even bother researching these seven other companies if the price seems fair to me and it's easy I'll just go and book it and be done with it do I have to have my own booking tool to get you to put it on my website how does that work do you have booking tools or how does that work I personally don't have a booking tool that can do something like that so to kind of find the tool that works best for you that's happy that you're happy with and I will happily get that implemented on your website has a booking tool yeah Tom yes anybody can pretty much use anybody that's using main central should probably be using the booking tool yeah I you know I see a lot of companies I'll speak to castle keepers we're well over half of the jobs that we book now or through online booking that we never even speak to the client and people are so afraid of this are you so you've been doing it for a long time Tom are you getting so what are what is it I hear people are afraid of oh they're afraid that I'm not going to have availability on that day they're going to book a day and I won't be able I think that's the number one thing oh no I'm going to they're going to book their job and they're going to say that it's like in this condition and then we're going to get out there and the place is going to be a pit it's going to be garbage dump there's always that risk there's that risk you're going to do if you're quoting it over the phone of course so you handle it the same way and you're dealing with the exceptions and if you let the exceptions drive your business you're leaving a lot of money on the table you know I mean if it's happening half the time you got a big problem and you need to rethink how you're marketing and setting expectations but you know if one out of 50 jobs that winds up happening that's still you know more than fully expected to be but okay it's a cost of doing business you can deal with it so I try to tell people like if they say something like yeah but this one time I went out to this job blah blah blah I'm like well was it like one of the first few times that you ever did it because I can understand that if it was like the first time that you ever tried it and you go out and the place is trashed alright you probably have a mixed up idea about how this works you probably think you're going to have this happen a lot but realistically it does not happen enough to keep people from doing it everybody's got an online booking tool so it must be working for some people and you don't see the bigger company saying oh no I got to get rid of that booking tool because it's happening so much now I'm sorry Tom no I'm agreeing with you and it's where it's going I mean it's already there but you're just going to see more and more and more it's going to be like just an expectation and nobody you know the day's coming when nobody's going to want to pick up a phone and talk to you same as the texting yeah it's all along the same idea of people don't want to talk to you they don't want to talk to their own families much less talk to some company about stuff people don't want to pick up my son still text me or he'll box me if he wants to hear my voice right that's like as close as you can if you call him there's no answer and you can text back what do you want mom although I have to say at my last event in Vegas Gavin did call me actually called while I was presenting and I was like y'all it's my son and people were like pick it up what happened something must be big going on if he's actually calling so sometimes they call it's just not common oh look how cute you are there Riley so young we're still young but you were even younger yeah we're pushing up to the top of the hour here so Riley if anybody wants to get a hold of you to talk about your web design services or schedule talk I'm going to drop the links to both of these sites and chat I'm assuming they can reach you through either or both yeah yeah either way works or if you want to just send me a facebook message that works perfectly as well I keep a pretty close eye on my facebook messages so and I have to give quick props to that so one thing that you are amazing at Riley I don't even know if I'm sending facebook messages or texts but I just drop you stuff all the time hey Riley blah blah blah I don't think it's ever been even an hour has gone by before you respond right I feel like you're like on it yeah I mean I try and be as quick as possible although I don't want to set like an expectation that I'm always going to respond within an hour because that's it yeah we're going to be testing you now you are and sometimes you might not even respond but you'll respond when the thing is done it's like okay Liz that's already handled blah blah blah so you actually practice what you preachers around the texting okay this was fun Riley this was good information truly and always like talking about the text oh my gosh he does particularly funny unfortunately we are at the top of the hour so we're going to have to wrap it up for the moment but we're going to be back next Wednesday five o'clock eastern we are going to be back next week right Liz we are who are we going to be with next month I don't know but we'll be getting the you like how I asked first we should probably be texting folks through what's coming up the smart business that actually would be smart that actually would be really smart it would be a smart business wouldn't it it would be a smart business Riley thanks so much thank you Riley bye everyone