The power of FREE… electricians don't give away your most valuable resource as the first thing!

Transcript

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Hey guys, James Midwest here from Marketing Secrets for Electricians and today we're looking at the word free and it's a powerful tool that has been used for, I don't know, centuries, essentially because it's effective. People want free things. They're attracted to that word. They get something for nothing in effect and it's used in businesses today. If you look around online and just, you know, you drive around, I'm sure you'll see a free advert, get this free thing.

However, electricians, we use free in a different manner that is not very effective. So I want to talk about that, see what we can do to change that. So let's look into it. So here's what I hear a lot. How do normal electricians like us who are properly trained and licensed, who are not willing to cheat and take shortcuts and who are wanting to own a successful electrical business?

How do we compete against the big guys who own the market share or the guys that charge peanuts for an electrical job? On top of that, we want to employ the best electricians so we can get off the tools and have plenty of time for other areas of life. That's the question. Join me and follow along as we search for the answers. My name is James Wrest and welcome to Marketing Secrets for Electricians.

Back to when I was running my own electrical business and how I would use free in that business and go from there. So essentially the free marketing or the free thing that I would give out was a free estimate or free quote. So on the website, get this free quote. And that was basically all that I was going to give away for free in return for the user. contacting me now, while this was good and effective.

So it was effective because I would arrive to jobs and I would get the work because other electricians would charge, you know, 50, 100 bucks, whatever it was, just to show up and give the customer an estimate as to how much they're going to be charged. Now, that's like, well, I don't even know if I'm going to go from from the customer's point of view. They don't know if they're going to go with you yet. They're still deciding and you're going to charge them just to show up to tell them how much you're going to charge them. It doesn't make sense in their mind.

So by offering a free quote, it gave that opportunity to a get to know me, the electrician, who I want, who I was, what I stand for, and then also give them a price or an estimate that the job would be, you know, XYZ amount for them. And they can then decide for themselves. Now, the downside for the electrician, this is where I see a lot of electrical, electrical sites, web pages. They're all giving this free quote, free estimate, which is great. However, the free thing is costing us time, which is our most valuable asset.

Yeah, you can't get your time back. It's costing you the electrician time. If they get three quotes, it's then costing three electricians, you know, three hours. It's 20 minutes. They're 20 minutes back and 20 minutes to quote the job.

You're wasting. That's three hours of time. People have spent to give a customer a estimate on a job. And only one is ever going to win the job. So it's it's not the best way to go about it.

And you also, you know, you're consuming your fuel wear and tear. Where else could you better spend your time? Because if you don't win that job, it's essentially a waste of time because, you know, you can't get that hour back, you haven't earned any money for it. So what was the point of doing the free job? Now, I've been talking with Sean from Current Electrical in Canada, and we're working away or discussing how to do this in an online manner.

So the setup that we're looking at where we're still going to give a free estimate, but we're not going to go to their place. We're not going to drive there straight up. So the flow of this is where the customer will fill out their form. So they get the website, they click on the free thing and they give them the name. The next bit, they go on another page.

So this is the flow of the funnel there for the customer to go through if they are going to get a quote from us. So you want to qualify the customer. You don't want to just give out your time so freely because it's a valuable resource. You don't want to waste your time. Nor the customers.

So we want to be efficient. So the first bit is you just want to get their email. That's the most important thing because if you get their email, if they run away, you've got a way to call them back or contact them, email a number, contact them without actually going to the house. And if they don't respond good, you didn't want to go to the house anyway because they're not a reliable. They're not going to pick up or answer an email.

They're not a reliable customer. So it's not going to work just to show up. It's like a pre-qualifying. That's one step. The next step is on the next page.

We want to give them some information to ask about their job. So if they fill this out and go to the next, the third step, if they fill out the second step where they gather their information, they tell you about the job, this is qualifying them to the next step. And the next step, you can actually give them a calendar. So there's tools you can use that can automatically schedule you in. However, we're not scheduling you in for a day on the site.

Quote, we're giving them a video quote. So what does that mean? It means on the third page they can schedule in for a time that suits both of you. And all you're going to do is sit at your computer or on your phone wherever you are. If you're on another job and you've got that time booked in, you can just pick up the phone and do a video call with Hangouts, Facebook, whatever it may be.

And you can connect with the customer and you can just walk through and they can show you, hey, I've got this light here. And here, whatever the job is, and you can give them an estimate without actually going to their home. So if we look at that, what does that do? Well, it saves you at least the travel time. So you no longer having to go to the house, waste fuel, and then travel back to the next job.

And it's still giving the customer a good estimate as to what it would cost without them just giving you, hey, I want a light installed. Or I want a PowerPoint or I want a ceiling fan installed. Yeah. Okay. You could give a roundabout figure, but if you can see the job and talk with them, you're also connecting with them.

They get to see what you like. You get to see what the customer's like. You don't have to travel there. And the customer gets a closer figure, which you can then finalize when you go to the job. If they say, yes, I want to use you.

And the next step is if they're like, okay, you estimate it's going to cost them $1,000 and like, okay, good. I want you to come out and actually give me a solid figure before you start. So there's two options here. And the one option I would try and do when I was electrician was I would go there and I'll give them a free quote and I would want to start the job there. So I'd actually tell the customers, okay, I'm going to come and it's going to cost, you know, I'll give you a price and estimate of what it will cost.

And if you're happy with that because I'm there, will you be happy with me to do the job? And I had a admin staff and they would set that up for me. So they would pre-qualify the customer and the job ideally to say, say that. So if I go there, that would make space and I could do the job there. And then, I mean, it was a big job, maybe not, but smaller job.

Sure. Let's just, you know, we're there. I don't want to come back if I don't have to. The other option is if the job's a thousand dollars, like, oh yeah, could you come around and just like, you know, give me a firm figure so that that's it. You can say, okay, I'm going to charge you a call out fee.

However, that call out fee is going to be redacted from the price if you go ahead with the job. So say the job ended up being a thousand dollars, but you charged a hundred dollars for the call out. You only then charge them $900 to finish the job. So this is kind of the flow that we're looking at creating right now in a sales funnel. That is going to automate the process, eliminate the time wasters and save you time and still generate work.

Now, that being said, this is one avenue, how it's still using your time. And this is, this is like, if you look online, marketers, the online marketers that service the online industry do not do it this way. Time is the most valuable asset, as I've been saying this whole episode. We want to put that as the last thing that the customer gets, not the first thing. So we've, we've managed to create a sales funnel that's like reducing the amount of time or time wasters that will get to you.

However, you're still going to get a few quotes and that's also just part of the service industry. However, I want to give you a concept or a different way of looking at it where you can go, okay, instead of trading my free, my time for free, why don't I create something? So spend a bit of time upfront to create something that my customers will want my ideal customer, the customer avatar that we've talked about in previous episodes. What do they want? So say I'm installing or I'm an electrician and I'm like focused on saving power.

Maybe I, my, maybe my customers want to know how to save power so I can create a hundred page or a three point checklist or whatever that is, or a video series or a book where I'm going to email or physically deliver a book to you where you're going to get, Hey, here's how you can save power. The five step method that I use as an electrician in my own house, whatever the title may be. But the point is you create some kind of content that you give away for free in exchange for the user's email or the person's email or contact details. So email or the phone number, you give that away in exchange for this. It's actually called a lead magnet.

So it's like attractive to your attractive character or your ideal character, your ideal customer. And when they see it, they're like, okay, I'll give you my email address. That's nothing. And then this can be used as a starting point of building a relationship. But also if you can do it correctly, say they're wanting to save power in that book that you give away for free, you can mention things that they can do and some of the things you will do.

In the framework to saving power, they say there's seven steps. Okay. Step six is where they might need an electrician to come in and do the actual job. So they're like, okay, I'm working through one, two, three, four, five. And step six is like, oh, an electrician.

Oh, who helped me give this? Oh, this electrician. So they're going to be more inclined to use you. You've already built a relationship with them. And this content doesn't take up your time.

You're educating the customer without your time. It's key and electricians can use this greatly to their advantage where you create something content once and there's a free form like blogs, like this podcast, YouTube, Facebook, there's all the free stuff. But then there's the exchange of it's like not it's free, but they give you something in return. So they're just giving your email, their email or their phone number. So you can then talk to them now that would then be the start of the funnel where once they've exchanged that bit of information for their email, you can do a lot with that email.

And even on the next page, I'm not going to go into that right now because that's not the focus of this particular episode, but just start thinking about your customer, what you can do to serve them. And then how can you package that in a way where they're going to want to give you their email address or their phone number in exchange for that bit of information that then you can then give to them and you can move forward in building a relationship with your customer. So I hope that helps. If you have any questions, feel free to join the Facebook group marketing secrets for electricians and we can brainstorm ideas as to what you can create for your electrical business. So I think it's important that we all don't do the same thing in the sense like you've because every business is different.

Every you are different. You as the electrician is different. You have a different style. You have a different customer. Every electrician is business.

Every business is different. So we want to create different unique products. And this is a way for you to stand out. And it's a free product. It's a free thing.

But it saves you time, a lot of time. And this is how you grow and scale your business without adding more manpower to the business. So let's discuss ways and opportunities that you can use to get your business, your electrical business out there to your ideal customers and then start building the relationship. So I hope that helps and I'll talk to you soon. And you can get your question answered there and we work together to help you build a electrical sales funnel for your business that produces leads and sales on autopilot.

That's the goal. Come join in and let's make it happen.