missed calls – Page 2

How to Slow Down in the Summer Without Losing Fall Business

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Summer is a time for family vacations, relaxing afternoons at the beach, and fun adventures with the kids. And when you own a business and make your own schedule, it’s easy to take as much time off as you want and enjoy every last ray of sunshine. However, if you plan to slow down during the summer months, you won’t be bringing in much revenue. That means you won’t want to be paying for things you don’t need, including certain online advertising services. At the same time, you don’t want to do anything that will jeopardize your business come fall.
Here are our recommendations for when you want to slow down in the summer and pick right back up once fall rolls around.

Do NOT Stop Your SEO

Even if you’re planning to take an entire month’s vacation, don’t stop your SEO. It’s not something you can just pause and resume. If you stop your SEO, all of your progress will be deconstructed and, when you want to restart your program, you’ll have to rebuild from the ground up. It may seem like you’re saving money by skipping a month’s payment, but you’ll actually cost yourself more money in the long run when your campaign loses momentum and you have to wait for it to ramp up again. If you want your fall season to start strong, you simply cannot afford to stop your campaign.
Look at it this way: If you were to go away for a month, would you sell your house and then re-purchase it when you returned? We’re betting no.

DO Pause Your PPC

While you can’t pause your SEO, you can feel free to have us pause your PPC campaign. Since you’re not going to be taking calls or booking jobs while you’re on vacation, there’s no need to pay for people to click on your ads. Once you’re back in the swing of things and ready to work, you can have our specialists resume your PPC campaign. The leads will start rolling in again in no time.
This doesn’t just apply to when you take an extended vacation, either. You can do this if you’re taking a weekend off or even if you’re just booked up for the next few days. We have a particularly astute client, Marvel Appliances Service in Miami, FL, who has this down to a science. He runs his PPC campaign during the week and then pauses it on the weekends when he’s all booked up and can’t handle any more calls. He saves money without sacrificing leads.
It’s kind of like turning off your air conditioning when you leave for the weekend.

DO Reroute Your Phone Number

Rerouting your phone number is super easy to do right from the Client Portal. If you’re spending quality time with your family at the beach one day, you can quickly set your calls to forward to e-mail or to a different phone number so that your cell phone isn’t ringing off the hook. Once you’re ready to take calls again, you can return to the Client Portal and set your phone number back the way it was. But don’t forget to follow up with all those calls you missed!
If you’ll be unavailable for an extended period of time, you can take this a step further by “renting” out your LeadTrax™ site to a local friend in the same industry as you. You would forward your incoming calls to their phone number, and they would pay you a small fee for those calls. It could be a great way to earn a little money while you’re away and help out a friend at the same time.

DO Change Your Voice Mail Greeting

Before you go on vacation for weeks at a time, be sure to change your voice mail greeting so your customers are aware of your availability. You can simply tell them the range of dates that you’ll be away and the date that you’ll be back in business. Giving them this information will ensure that they don’t feel ignored when their calls aren’t returned right away. If they’re existing, loyal customers, they’ll most likely wait for you to return. Prospects might even be willing to wait if they know you’re a reputable company and that you’re just on vacation for a short time.
This puts you in a great position for the fall because you won’t leave any former customers feeling spurned.

Remember to Follow Up

No matter what you decide to do while you’re away, following up with any missed calls is a must. Don’t make your prospects or current customers feel unimportant. The best way to ensure recurring business in the fall is to remind customers how much you value them. As soon as you get back from vacation, return their calls or reply to their e-mails and do your best to fit them into your schedule as soon as possible. While some of those leads might have moved on this time, they’ll remember your attentiveness and may very well call you again in the future.

You Might Be Paying Your Advertiser for Nothing

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Getting customers to call your business for a job isn’t easy. That’s why many business owners decide to team up with an online advertising agency to help them generate leads. However, generating leads is only half the battle. Once the leads come in, it’s the business’s responsibility to close the deal. If you miss a lot of calls, you’re missing out on jobs—and essentially paying your advertiser for nothing.
At Prospect Genius, our extensive data show that a large percentage of local businesses aren’t picking up their phones. Because lead generation is what we do, we track our clients’ leads and phone calls as a measure of campaign performance. In reviewing this data, we observed that virtually every one of our clients has missed a prospective customer call at least once.
This is a troublesome trend, but it’s also understandable. We believe that a constant barrage of solicitor phone calls is to blame for business owners’ reluctance to answer their phones. As business owners ourselves, we’ve noticed firsthand that the current volume of solicitor phone calls has become overwhelming. As a result, business owners aren’t jumping up to answer their phones every time they ring.
But here’s the hard truth: While avoiding the phone may solve your solicitor problem, it creates an even bigger problem for your company’s finances. If you want to book jobs and make money, you simply must answer your phone.

Missed Calls = Lost Revenue

Why are missed calls such a big problem? When you don’t answer your phone, you’re essentially sending that customer to a competitor. Prospective customers call around when they need a job performed, and they’ll keep calling local businesses until they finally book one. If their call goes to voice mail, they’ll likely move on to the next company on their list, unless they promptly receive a call back.
When this happens, you not only miss out on that one job—you also miss out on any future business from that customer and potential word-of-mouth referrals they could share. For businesses that see a lot of repeat customers (appliance repairmen, HVAC contractors, and cleaning services, for example), this is a tremendous loss. Plus, unanswered calls make prospects feel undervalued, causing them to have a negative experience with your brand. What do you think the chances are that they will ever call you back in the future?
If your average job nets you $100, you’re effectively writing a $100 check to your competitor every time you fail to answer a prospect’s call!

Think You’re an Exception to the Rule?

Think again.
Across the board, across all industries, our clients are missing valuable calls. No one is exempt. To show how severe this issue really is, we sampled some of our most prominent client industries and noted their percentage of missed calls. Take a look:

Automotive repair: 60% of all calls were missed
Construction: 87% of all calls were missed
Electrical: 39% of all calls were missed
Handyman services: 58% of all calls were missed
Landscaping: 58% of all calls were missed
Plumbing: 35% of all calls were missed

Just about every business commits this faux pas at some time or another.

Avoid Solicitors Without Avoiding Customers

Yes, solicitor calls are a major problem for small businesses, but ducking your calls isn’t the way to handle it. Here are some alternatives.

Answer Your Phone

A human-to-human connection is what’s most important to prospective customers when they’re looking for a service provider, so do whatever it takes to ensure that someone answers your phone when it rings. You can do this by having your advertising calls sent to multiple phone numbers at the same time, or by routing your calls to your cell or office when it makes sense. Many phone systems even allow you to ring multiple phones at once or in a sequence. For Prospect Genius clients, this is a free option that can be enabled at any time just by calling us.
If none of these options seems viable, you can always opt for a low-cost answering service that takes your calls and messages on your behalf. Many are available in the range of $1 per call, making this a surprisingly affordable option. Plus, it can weed out 100% of the solicitor calls that you’re trying to avoid.
You can also combine these two options and route calls to yourself and the answering service at the same time. That way, if you can pick up, then you save the $1; if not, you don’t necessarily lose the customer.

Set Up Your Voice Mail

Since it’s difficult to guarantee that you’ll answer your phone every single time, it’s crucial to establish a backup system. First and foremost, set up your voice mail. That means activating it and creating a professional greeting that will give your prospects a strong first impression. Here’s a script we highly recommend:

“Hi, you’ve reached [company name]. At the moment, we’re giving our full attention to another customer. If you leave us a message, we’ll return your call as soon as possible and give you our full attention, as well. Thank you and have a nice day!”

If a prospect does leave a message, you must call them back as soon as possible, preferably within 15–20 minutes. You should also clean out your voice mailbox occasionally. If it gets full, it won’t allow new callers to leave a message!
Prospect Genius clients have the option to use a separate voice mail for all calls sent from us. The recording is then e-mailed to them for them to check, thus keeping their personal and business calls separate.

Don’t Neglect Your E-Mail

These days, e-mail is just as important as the phone, if not more so. Growing numbers of people are simply more comfortable communicating via e-mail, so that’s how they opt to contact local businesses. If you don’t check your e-mail regularly, then you’re bound to miss out on a substantial number of leads.
If checking your e-mail is too much of a headache because you’re often out on a job, there are several tools available to make it easier. For instance, Prospect Genius clients have the option to have all e-mail leads read to them over the phone, eliminating the need to check their e-mail.
You can also create an auto-reply that will send an immediate response to prospects when they e-mail you. If you prefer the phone to e-mail, then you can even use your auto-reply to instruct prospects to call you at a specified number. For example, your auto-reply email could say:

“Thanks for contacting us. Due to the nature of our work, we are better able to respond to phone calls. Please contact us at 555-123-1234 so we can best serve your needs.”

Prospect Genius Has Solutions

Prospect Genius offers convenient, easy-to-use tools that deliver many of the above solutions. Anyone enrolled in our lead generation program has access to them through our Client Portal. These tools include:

Extra metered phone lines
Call routing
E-mail-to-phone notifications
Missed call notifications via text or e-mail
Call logs and recordings

Many of the solutions are well within your own power—like creating a professional voice mail greeting and responding to e-mails and missed calls—but we have professionally designed tools that will make those tasks much simpler.
No advertiser can succeed for you on their own. You’ve got to look at any campaign as a partnership and uphold your end of the bargain—which largely means answering the calls they send you. Invest in your business by answering calls and e-mails to capture the maximum number of leads for your company.

Missed Calls, Missed Customers

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Right now, you could be hindering your company’s growth without even knowing it.
It’s no joke. Every time you miss a call, you lose money. In fact, you could be losing upwards of thousands of dollars annually from missed calls alone. Whether it’s a call from Google+ Local or a prospective customer, you chip away at your business’s future success every time you don’t pick up the phone.
At Prospect Genius, we’ve noticed a disturbing behavior among our clients: they aren’t answering their phones! For some reason, they don’t seem interested in speaking with prospective customers. But we suspect that our clients aren’t the only small business owners who are letting countless calls go to voice mail or ignoring calls altogether due to a heavy workload. While it’s understandable that you’re too busy to answer your phone, we’re going to demonstrate in this post why it’s still a huge mistake.

When Google Calls, You Better Answer

As we discussed in a previous post, Google has been contacting local businesses in an attempt to verify their locations and contact information. While every business owner is theoretically vulnerable to these phone calls from Google, we’ve discovered that older listings are the ones being targeted specifically. If your listing predates the Panda and Penguin updates—or, in other words, it’s at least three years old—then you’re likely to receive a phone call from Google (if you haven’t already). When Google calls, it’s imperative that you answer all of their questions correctly, lest your business listing get suspended and you lose contact with your customers. But before you can answer those questions, you’ll need to answer your phone.

Customers Are Calling. Are You Picking Up?

It may seem unnecessary and obvious to tell you that customers are calling your business, but you’d be surprised by how many prospective customer calls are missed by small business owners each month. To demonstrate that point, we sampled our own clients to see how many calls are answered, how many answered calls lead to sales, and how many calls go to voice mail. Here were the two biggest takeaways:

Nearly one-third (29.49%) of customer calls go to voice mail.
Roughly 60% of answered customer calls lead to a sale.

Prospective customers are looking for a service to be provided. They want to hire someone. But that means if a prospective customer gets your voice mail, they’re most likely going to move on and dial the next business on their list. In other words,when you fail to answer your phone, you lose business. Plain and simple.
A Real-Life Example:
A Prospect Genius team member recently remodeled her home. She called 17 different deck builders before even one of them got back to her. That means all of those other deck builders lost out on her business! She needed to hire someone, and she kept looking until she got a response.

Missed Calls Mean Lost Revenue…

Using our own call logs, we broke down the volume of missed calls by average job prices with high and low estimates of leads per month. Then, based on the 29.49% ratio of missed calls, we determined how much money each category is losing per year from not answering the phone. Take a look:

Average Job	Leads Per Month (High and Low Estimate)	Revenue Lost Each Year
$100	20	$1,200.00
$100	70	$4,200.00
$250	20	$3,000.00
$250	70	$10,500.00
$500	20	$6,000.00
$500	70	$21,000.00
$2,000	20	$24,000.00
$2,000	70	$84,000.00

It’s tough to get an exact idea of what your phone habits are like. We recommend implementing some type of call recording system for your business’s phone line so that you can keep track of many calls are answered and how many go to voice mail. You may be surprised by how much you’re missing out on!

…And Lost Referrals, Too

Referrals are integral to the growth of your business. For every satisfied customer that you have, you can expect a handful of referrals to come to you through word of mouth. With a good referral, you can turn one job into three or four. But when you don’t answer your phone, you’re missing out on the opportunity to grow your client base. In other words, you’re not only missing out on immediate business, but you’re also losing a significant amount of future business.
A Real-Life Example:
We return to the story of that same Prospect Genius team member from above. Further down the road, she needed a home inspector and hired a reliable home inspection company through a friend’s referral. Once the job was finished and she was happy with the experience, she wound up referring that same company to six other people, all of whom booked jobs. When that home inspector first answered his phone, he probably had no idea that there would be seven total jobs on the line.

Find a Way to Answer Your Calls

It’s simple: Responding to customers as promptly as possible is a surefire way to gain more business.
But we know it’s impossible to be available 100% of the time. That’s why we’re sharing a list of recommendations that we often give to our own clients:

Hire an answering service or receptionist to pick up the phone while you’re on the job.
Forward calls to your mobile phone.
Sign up for one of the many available call-tracking features that notify you by text or e-mail as soon as you’ve missed a call.

You can also record a friendly, professional voice mail greeting to let your prospects know that, even though you’re busy on the job, their business is still a priority for you. Here’s a great example from All Pro Appliance and TV Repair, a stellar local business in Allen, TX:

Click to Listen
You can hear the sincerity in the business owner’s voice. Not only does he offer a friendly greeting, but he also sounds like he genuinely wants to speak with the caller. He explains that his technicians answer calls personally and asks the caller to be patient. It’s a great example of how you can convey the importance of any given customer’s call.
Prospective customers are much more likely to wait for your response once they hear how authentic and friendly you are.
No matter which strategies you use, anything that enables you to answer and return more phone calls will be a massive improvement. Don’t let a whopping one-third of your business slip away—do what it takes to make sure that your phone is being answered.
The Prospect Genius program comes with a free call-tracking feature as well as a Client Portal that provides you with various reports so you can watch your campaign’s performance. If you’re interested in learning more about our lead generation program, give us a call at 1-800-689-1273.

Prospect Genius

Contact Us

Business Hours

Let’s Connect!

What Drives Us?

Client Portal App

Helpful Links

Sign up for our newsletter!