If you would like to be a guest on my podcast to share your take on the opportunity that ductless heat pumps offer today’s HVAC contractor, please drop me a note at info at dominateductless dot com or click here to send me a note through my contact page.
Mike Cappuccio: Good morning and welcome to the Dominate Ductless Podcast, where we tell the stories of entrepreneurs who are building their businesses that are focused on ductless heat pumps!
I’m Mike Cappuccio, the owner of Dominate Ductless, and I’m excited today to have a longtime friend and owner of Comfort Media Group, Don Lafferty.
Don Lafferty: Hey, Michael, good morning!
Mike: Morning, Don! How are you?
Don: I’m good.
Mike: So Don, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your company and what you do in your day-to-day roles in your company.
Don: So I am a longtime sales and marketing guy, and back in 2006, I got involved in digital marketing by accident. And as I was writing about it for MySpace marketing, for using MySpace for marketing, one thing led to another, and then several years later, I was doing some freelance marketing for a variety of different companies and I got involved with heating and air conditioning contractor, which eventually led to some success in selling Mitsubishi ductless systems. And that’s how you and I got connected.
I developed with my then business partner, a sales funnel, an online sales funnel for educating customers about what ductless is. Because we know in the US, most people don’t know what ductless is. And it was very successful. And one day you called me up and said, hey, what are you guys doing? How do you do this and how can I implement it in my ductless installation company?
And so today we work with a wide variety of contractors around the country, helping them get found by people who are looking for home comfort solutions and then educating those homeowners about the ductless opportunity, what it is, how it works, and if it’s a good fit for their homes. And we do that through Internet marketing, we do that through website marketing. And that’s kind of morphed into a lot of different things. And it all depends on the size of the contractor we’re working with, what we recommend.
But yeah, that’s what I do. I spend all my days trying to solve that very dilemma for contractors and all over the United States.
Dan Kelly, Head of Video Production Shooting a Bryant Ductless Case Study for Redmond’s Complete Comfort, Loch Haven, PA
Mike: That’s a daunting task to do that. And I think back of how we generated leads 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and how we were generating leads when we left, when I exited my company. But I mean, how long have we known each other?
Don: You and I met in December of 2014. That’s when we had our first conversation. Maybe November. By January of 2105, you’d hired us and we went to work trying to grow NETR ductless mini-split installation business.
Mike: Yeah. So we’ve known each other for about ten years. Wow, that’s a long time!
I mean, when we sit back and look at. I did a training class yesterday, and it was kind of like I said to the group, I said how you marketed ten years ago and how you market today is totally different. A lot of things have changed. And I look at a lot of these contractors and they just don’t get it. Some of them, they’re just not understanding what truly needs to be done and buying habits and how people buy things.
When I tell people that it’s an average of zero to 18 months before the first time someone touches a website or looks or sees the product till the time that they buy it. And that’s why, you know, when we talk about the sales funnel, it is so important in different aspects of where people sit in that funnel. You know, when I always tell people, you know, the top of the funnel person is, you know, they’re really, really top of funnel.
And what’s happening a lot of times is contractors are going out and they’re doing what I call ductless education one-on-one with the homeowner. Because the homeowner, not that, you know, these contractors, they call them tire kickers. They’re going out there. They don’t know anything about dark bliss. When they called me out to their house and they’re looking for an estimate. Well, no, it’s not that. They’re not a tire kicker. They’re, they’re, they’re just very top of funnel people that don’t fully understand the product, the processes, what it costs, how it gets installed, things like that.
And I felt like when, when we were working with you, you and our aspects of what we did, it was education. Educate the consumer. Educate the consumer. The more you educate the consumer, the further they fall down into the funnel. And the longer time to educate is actually good because that’s when they’re really getting ready to buy. And being able to see that in a sales funnel is really, really good. When you look at that and you can see that and understand what’s actually going on.
Don, tell me, how has Dominate Ductless helped? Or, I don’t know if help is really the word, but the Dominate Ductless has helped your clients. I guess I’ll word it like that. Is how does dominate, Ductless, help your clients? What have you seen when these people come to you? After I do a training, what usually happens? And how do you, how do you go about helping them at that point?
Don: So it’s funny, there’s two answers to that question. There’s customers. There’s clients we have who meet you in one of your trainings and they come back from that training and say, oh, wow, we’re already doing some of this. Mike has given me the other side of the formula. That is the process side, the installation side, the operational side of things.
And then there are clients that come to me and say, hey, I just had a training with a guy named Mike Capuccio, and I want what he’s having.
Whatever you did for him, I want you to do it for me. And so what I find is contractors who attend your training get lit up because it’s the first time they’ve seen someone with a process to grow ductless business and has successfully deployed that process to grow their business.
So, you know, I got to tell you, Mike, every single time you refer or someone comes to me after they’ve seen, they’ve gotten our name at your seminar, they become the biggest ductless contractor in their service area. It happens every single time. And it doesn’t matter how small that contractor is. You know, they punch above their weight in their, you know, in their service area.
And a great example, I mean, we got several great examples.
Mike: Is it really work? We’re not sitting here giving you a bunch of, a bunch of bullets. The process in the system does work.
Don: Oh, yeah.
Mike: It’s just not the only guy who’s done it. There’s been multiple other contractors, I believe, that have done it. Am I correct?
Don: Well, yes. After they’ve gone to your training.
Mike: Yeah.
Don: And they see, oh, okay, I need to set my inventory up this way, I need to set my trucks up this way, I need to train my install crews this way, I need to price my jobs this way, I need to look at my hours this way. So these are, these have nothing to do. These things have nothing to do with marketing. Nothing. So what happens is then they come to us and they say, okay, we’re going to go back to our shop and implement all these systems that Mike has recommended. How do you go find us people who are interested? And so then the marketing kicks in.
But I got to say, when I first met you, Michael, and I’m taking a little bit of a guess here, but in the US, ductless was really only at about 7% market penetration.
Mike: That wasn’t a lot.
Don: It might be 11-12% today. It might be, but it’s booming. And we know that. We know that because we’re close to it. But the point is, 80% of the people in America, more than 80% of American homeowners, don’t even know what it is, never even heard the term before. And sometimes the first time they hear it is when you tell them, hey, have you ever considered, instead of your central air and your gas furnace or your oil boiler, have you ever considered this ductless? And people go, huh? What’s that? Right?
So what we recommend is get ahead of that conversation. And like you said, educate that homeowner before they pick the phone up. That way, when you go to their house, they know what it is, they know how it works, they kind of know what it costs, and they trust you because they got all their information from you. And now you go to sit down at that kitchen table and that long educational process that usually begins with, have you ever heard of ductless? No, you’re not having that conversation.
Mike: And that’s part of the sales funnel and the online marketing. Now, people, some people think of online marketing as, I have to get a lead, I have to get a lead. I used to think of online marketing as educate, educate, educate, educate. And at the end of the funnel, when everyone looks at the sales funnel, at the end of it, they will come out a lead.
And I think when I show people the sales funnel, in the actual training, that they start to grasp that and understand that, because they don’t know why they’re going out and on these leads and doing ductless one-on-one education with homeowners. And when I look at it, I just, you know, I try to explain it to them that just, that they don’t, they just don’t understand the product. And you have to go out to the home and educate.
But what I do tell them is that education process, if you actually spend the time, I tell this to good salespeople. Always someone offers you a cup of coffee at the table in the morning, the afternoon, whatever. Sit down, drink the coffee, sit down, listen. God gave us two ears and one mouth to listen and listen to what they’re saying and propose solutions to what their pain points are. There’s nothing worse than salespeople that just go in and design and don’t listen.
And a good process of listening and having a good questionnaire to ask the questions that are important with this product. They’re the ones who are going to win. They’re the ones who are going to win when we look at this and they just think that because we have to go spend time with them and educate. Is it what I do? Well, it is what you do. That’s part of doing sales, is educating people. It’s a good process, a real good sales process.
When you look at that, Don, I want to ask you this question. Can we hit on a couple of high level topics that have really helped contractors throughout the United States? A couple of high levels that we’ve done that you’ve done that have actually helped us. Like what is this? I mean, I know what the answer to it is, but I want to hear it from you. What high level topics that have really helped the contractor?
Don: Well, the ground is always shifting under our feet because of Google.
And the way that people buy things these days starts with a search on their mobile device. For the most part, even recently, Google’s making changes to what you find when you do a search there.
But from a high-level perspective, I would say this. It depends on the contractor. We talked about this many times. A million dollar contractor is going to have very different concerns than a $10 million contractor or a $40 million contractor.
So if we’re talking high level, I’d say make sure you’re satisfying Google number one, because that every one of your buyers is going to come through Google. Every one of your new buyers is going to come through Google. Make sure your Google business is tight. When I say tight, I mean it’s got the right information in it, it’s got the right exact address that you use in your legal paperwork and the right name in there. I mean, that sounds like a silly thing, but if that’s not lined up, Google won’t see you and people won’t find you.
And then consider for a minute the way you buy things. I mean, I talk to people every day that say I never buy anything online. That’s fine. They’re the minority. The majority of people are searching for solutions online and it’s pain based searches, just like you said, listen for their pain.
So one of the great things we like about ductless is that it’s a great problem room solution. So what do people search for when they have a problem room? My upstairs is too hot. I don’t have ductwork in my basement. I don’t have ductwork in my sunroom. I want to use my sunroom all year long. These are all solutions for ductless. You know, Ductless can be a good solution for these kinds of problems.
Mike: The other thing they’re looking for now is all of this green energy and converting their homes to whole home systems. They’re hearing they can put heat pumps in their homes now to heat their homes. And it’s just a lot of different.
Don: People are hearing today, you know, that the heat pump today that people are selling, it’s not the same heat pump you were selling 20 years ago. Right? It’s a much more advanced efficient.
Mike: It got a bad name. I think heat pumps really had a bad name many years ago. And the more of the older generation, I think when you go into homes, it becomes more of education on that. How do heat pumps work? So you have to have good material to show them how a heat pump works.
Don: Not just how it works, but that it does work in low ambient temperatures. Right? When you’re north of the Mason-Dixon, it’s worked in.
Mike: Let me show you some homes that it’s worked in. I know from a high level perspective, what helped me was, I can’t tell you just building out, if I looked at what you helped me with immensely, was building out case studies and problem and solution, because people have a problem. Here’s the solution. And I just kept showing them problem, solution problems.
When you show someone, you’ve done hundreds of homes with problems and solutions and it worked, that just sold jobs immediately on how it did it. But I mean, I always stress to contractors too that when you’re doing marketing, there’s a lot that has to go into it. There’s a lot of thinking.
When you were saying about Google, then you have to be aligned with Google. There’s a lot that goes on with that. And if you don’t know that, I always tell people in my training, look, someone puts a marketing person in their business and they think they know everything.
And I always say to them, look, if you had a cold, you’re going to go to a urgent care, you’re going to go in, give you some medicine and send you home, and a couple days later you feel better, but you need a heart transplant or a lung transplant, you’re going to a specialist. And I always refer, this is a specialist, Dawn’s a specialist. Comfort Media group’s a specialist. And this is what they specialize in. This is what they specialize in the CMG group. That’s what they do. Okay.
And then, you know, there’s other groups that do this and other groups that do that. So you have to look at too, in your business what marketing is going to benefit me and please have a specialist do it. I can’t tell you, I can’t stress it enough because if you have a part time marketing person/answer the phone person/does filing person/, you know, puts parts away or whatever, that’s not going to work if you’re really trying to grow your business.
Don: No, I agree.
Mike: You have to have people that know what they’re doing and specialize in what they’re doing. Like I said, you can have a general practitioner in your office that can pretty much oversee what the other people doing. And they’re going to really start to understand what those people do now and where the dollars are going and actually having educated meetings on, hey, how many of these did we get this week? Where did they come from? How did they come in to?
And then, okay, so if that’s what that marketing I was just to look at, that’s what’s working and this isn’t working. And having an educated marketing plan now I can put that money over. Where is it working? You know, and I think you and I have talked about groups where they say, look, you know, we’re funneling in more money on this this year because we know this is generating leads and getting us in homes to not sell sometimes, but to educate consumers in the home. Not to sell, to educate.
Once you educate and you spend the time to educate and someone else doesn’t, that’s where you’re building the trust. And if people are getting two and three quotes, they’re going to remember the person that educated them, spent the time with them, went through everything with them, didn’t rush in, didn’t rush out, spent the time with them and felt their pain and came up with good solution.
And that’s hard to do sometimes for some salespeople. I tell them that, you know, you have to spend time. It’s a four step process and you have to warm up. You have to listen. You have to assess and listen. And I think that’s one of the hardest parts with some of these salespeople. They go into homes and they don’t listen. They just go in and design their way and get in and get out. That’s all they want to do, get in and get out. You know, you have to spend an hour or two in the home sometimes doing these things.
So I guess in closing, Don, if you had a recommendation for contractors that we’ve really worked with, one good recommendation, what would that be? What would that be when they’re doing this? What would that high level recommendation be?
Don Lafferty: Well, it’s really hard to pick one thing when there’s two sides to this, to this formula, right? There’s the attraction side, like getting that interested person to pick the phone up and call you. And then there is the what happens when that phone call occurs or what happens when they fill out the form on your website and it lands in someone’s inbox at your shop. Right?
What happens to their experience at that point. You’ve spent all this money trying to attract that lead. You got to make darn sure that the customer experience on the inbound side when that lead hits your business, that they feel listened to like you said, and that they’re, that they’re what their goal is. Right?
They cause when someone’s doing that search, they’re in pain and they’re desperately trying to figure out and they’re scared because they know that unless they have a trusted contractor that they already work with or someone that comes highly recommended that they are at the mercy of figuring this out on their own. You want to make them feel like they’ve made the right decision.
From the moment they get to your website, you want them to go, oh, wow, I found the right person. I found the right company. And then when they contact you and they have an excellent experience on the phone, they go, thank goodness this is going to be, I made the right decision here or I’m on the right path here. Same thing.
When you send them an email, if they fill out a form, you don’t want them to wonder if somebody got it. You want them to get an email or a text message right away saying, hey Mike, we got your information. Someone will be in touch with you shortly. Stay by your phone. Here’s the number that you’re going to see. And they know youre, you’re plugged in, you’ve got a process, you’ve got a system and you’re going to take care of them.
So from a high level, there’s two parts. Make sure when someone gets to your website that you make it clear you’re the ductless expert in their area. And then once they reach out to you, you make sure that they know that you’ve heard them loud and clear and you’re on the case and you’re going to be helping them soon.
Mike Cappuccio: Yeah. There’s nothing worse than listening to phone calls. And I’ve listened to some around the country, to contractors with the customer service side of it because, you know, I’m gonna, I’m gonna bring up a whiteboard for 1 second here, 1 minute and I want to show you a little bit about, you know, what I do when I train and I think this is important that we really show this is that we’ve got a couple different parts of our business here and I, you know, the first one being is, you know, we’ve got this big gigantic marketing gear that we need to spin, you know, and this gear right here has got to spin, you know, and you’re taking this right here. I’m going to call that the marketing gear.
And you’re spending, you know, you’re actually spending money here. This is, this gear is what you’re putting money at. Okay. So if I’m spending money on marketing, what’s the ultimate thing that I’m trying to do? Well, actually, I’m trying to increase sales. So I’m trying to spin the sales gear. Correct. Over here. So I’m putting money here to get people into a home.
All right. But I think a lot of times the gear that lacks is this little tiny gear that we kind of put in here. And it’s really not round, it’s oval. And, you know, this right here is the customer service person. Customer service rep marketing. Customer service rep needs to know what marketing is doing. And the customer service’s goal is to put salespeople in the home. This is one of the most important people in a company.
And I really stress this, that this is not just someone who answers the phone. I mean, I listened to a phone call the other day where I had a contractor who spent tens of thousands of dollars creating a showroom in their business. Okay. Tens of thousands of dollars creating a showroom. And I always look at a showroom that it’s a retail facility to educate consumers. Basically took a phone call from someone on a weekend, it sounded like, and basically told the person, we don’t work weekends, we don’t work nights in. You have to book an appointment to come and see me. It was one of the ugliest phone calls I ever listened to.
And I’m saying to myself, I’ll bet you the owner doesn’t really know who’s even answering the phone. And that’s going on because if I was the owner of that company and I knew that was going on, I’d fix that right away real quick. Im spending money on marketing and Im building a retail facility to bring people into. And I don’t have people that. And I can’t tell you how many times a person is talking to somebody and they don’t even know who they are. They don’t have their name. They don’t have their information.
Look, if someone doesn’t book an appointment with you or a sales appointment to go into your home, if you’ve gathered their information and hey, it might not be time for the sales appointment just yet, but you’ve done some education with them on the phone, done some e learning, understand the products, you know who they are.
As long as you have their email address, you can put them into your sales funnel and educate them via digital marketing. That’s the goal. That’s the goal of the customer service person, not to sell. And like you said, feel their pain. Be nice!
I’m telling you, one of the most rewarding things that I used to find in business was when you would go into a home or someone would say, you know, once we, you know, once she knew that, people knew that the person that answered the phone cared, and it made the salesperson’s life so easy when they went into the home, because it was exactly what you said, Don. There was a comfort factor. They felt they knew that they picked the right people.
You know, I’m just, I could just, just think about a time where you’ve called somewhere and you’ve had a bad customer service experience, and the people are just miserable that work there, you know, just miserable.
And if you’re going to spend, I always tell people, if you’re going to spend a lot of money on marketing, make sure that your customer service gear is aligned with your marketing people and aligned with your salespeople, because these, these two gears right here are very important. Should be putting information to this customer service person all the time, greatly did a great job when you handled that call, or maybe you could have done this a little bit better.
But this is what, in a staff meeting, marketing should be telling customer service what we’re marketing this week. Customer service answers the phone. We have a discount or we have a coupon, or we have whatever they need to know that they need to understand that. And the marketing people have to be telling the customer service that they did this.
So, I mean, I can’t tell you the importance of that person. And when you really get that person aligned. And most of these bigger companies have customer service down pretty good. And there’s a reason why that’s where the appointment comes and that’s where they get people into the home. I’m just telling you, if you are a smaller company, listen, listen, don’t scold, don’t scold on these calls, because, you know what? Most of the time we find out people just don’t know how to answer the question.
So I’ll leave it at that with that. And, you know, I don’t know if there’s anything you’d like to share with that, but, I mean, I just feel it’s like we talked about. It’s a very high level topic.
Don Lafferty: So when you, when we’ve been exposed to recorded phone calls for years, right, we know we can do it, but people say, geez, I don’t have time to listen to that. I get X amount of calls a week. I don’t have time to listen to that. Trust me when I tell you, you listen to a few, you don’t need to listen to them all. You need to listen to just a small handful and right away you come up with some things that people need a little training on and it can dramatically improve the customer experience when they call you. And the outcome.
Mike Cappuccio: We do an hour training on customer service after we teach the marketing side and dominate. Douglas, I ask people pretty much at the end of that, before lunch is around where that comes in on day one. And I say, what did you learn this morning? They said we need to go back and look at our customer service.
We think we have some room for improvement there because show them the money. When you show them, if they only if they book five appointments today and what the closing rate is and what the dollar amount is on an average ticket and the four that you might have lost, how much more money you would have made. And if you’ve got salespeople who want to be in homes, they’re not going to get in homes if you don’t have the proper customer service person doing it.
Don Lafferty: So, you know, so my final recommendation to, to all the contractors that are listening to this is make sure that you cover your behind by having the right support people in your corner. And what I mean is get a coach, get a coach to help you through these things to keep you accountable. Make sure, get yourself a marketing pro that you can trust that may, they may not be able to do everything for you, but if you trust them, they can help you make decisions in who you hire, what you do, how you spend your money.
And they’re not in it for the money grab, right? They’re in it to help you be successful and meet with your team on a regular basis. Now, these are things that I don’t really get involved in as a marketing guy, right?
Mike Cappuccio: That’s the owner of the company that needs to do that. Spend an hour working on your business, not in it.
Don Lafferty: We have many, many clients where we know we’re generating leads, we know we’re generating the right activity for them. And they’re not making their goals because something’s failing on the operational side or on the sales side.
And when I say fail, that’s a strong word, but I mean, it’s just nothing clicking. And so they’re spending all this money and energy on the, on the top of the funnel and debt, pulling people down to the phone and then just not getting it done on the sales side or the customer service side. And so they’re, you know, you need to be able to, if you’re going to invest in marketing, make sure your house is in order and then you’ll be ready to grow.
Mike Cappuccio: I always tell people, don’t spend the money on marketing if you have, if you don’t have good customer service, people on the phone that know how to take an educated phone call and feel people saying, and, you know, it’s really good when we do that in the training because we can educate on, you know, how you go get the training on ductless products and these different things and not even so much ductless products, but just how to be nice, how to be nice to people on the phone, you know, and know that because that’s what’s going to drive the sales gear.
And if it’s another, I’m just going to add one level, one more topic and then we’ll, we’ll kind of, you know, go our separate ways today. But it’s, it’s basically have a good sales process for your salespeople when they go into a home, a process that everybody follows properly. That’s, you know, now you have a customer service manager, you have a sales manager, or that’s nine times out of ten, that’s usually the owner in these smaller companies. And they have to define what the sales process is and they have to go see are they following the process and there’s many tools out there for good processes that you can look at on the back end to see are they doing their job properly. So I’ll leave it at that.
But again, Don, hey, thank you for joining the Dominate Ductless Podcast!
This has been a great podcast, great conversation. This is where we tell the stories of entrepreneurs who are really trying to build their business that are focused on ductless heat pumps.
Have a great day and we will talk soon! Thank you!
Don Lafferty: See you, bud!
Mike Cappuccio: Thank you!
