First off, I want to start by thanking everyone on here for posting so much valuable information already! It’s super inspiring to see how many of you have been so incredibly successful in this business, and I have to say I’ve spent just about every spare moment over the last week scouring this amazing forum for info. You have answered many questions for me, including several I didn’t even know I had.
My question now is this: How should I field incoming calls while at my day job? As a phone tech support guy (currently), I know the importance of picking up when a customer calls, but, of course, while I am at my day job, I can’t just be yakking on my cell phone when I’m supposed to be working. For now I’ve set up a Google Voice number for people to call, so I can still access it from my cell but still have a separate line for the business.
I just put out my first round of door hangers (definitely need to do more) this last weekend, but I feel like not being able to answer calls during much of the day is going to hamper my marketing efforts, minimal though they may be thus far.
Set up EVERYTHING on autoresponder and have a professional voicemail recorded. We use mikalmedia on Fiverr for all recordings. She’s pretty and I like her voice. Nothing scientific.
Emails.
FB Messages.
Voicemail.
I’ll try to post the recording for the voicemail recording since last time I offered to have people call and hear it my phone went off a lot more than I cared for. Lol
It won’t let me upload a wav file, but the script is this:
Thank you for calling Squid’s Pressure Washing LLC, Kansas City’s highest rated exterior cleaning company and a veteran owned business. We’re unavailable to take your call at the moment, but your call is important to us.
Please leave a message with your name, number, and brief message and we’ll return your call within 24 hours or we’ll give you $50 off any of our residential flat rate services!
Very nice, I like it! I’ll have to do something similar. I’ll probably just start with a recording of myself for budgetary reasons; I’m no professional voice actor, but I’m on the phone for work all the time so I’m no stranger to that.
Still trying to finalize my flyer design, my goal is to print a couple hundred tomorrow and hit the streets. I’m so happy to have found this forum, the marketing section especially has been huge because that’s the part I know the least about, and of course no business can succeed if no one knows it exists. I’ve put together an ad with a deadline and free offer, and I’m hoping the fact that I put some research into creating the flyer will yield at least a couple leads by the end of the week, because getting even a job or two and the opportunity for accompanying 5 arounds would be awesome!
Sideline. $70/year and I have the business line on my personal phone. There’s a ton of options like auto responders you can add images to, multiple voicemail recordings, etc.
Works great and if you want to take the number somewhere else you can.
Other than forgetting to include phone numbers on every 1 out of 30 or so calls and sending a time sensitive lead to @Patriotspwashing instead of me I’ve been pretty happy with bidslot.
If the screw up just let them know and they’ll credit your hours/time back for those calls. I love not having to field calls.
Someone called last year asking if I’d wash excavators. I got the lead and told her I don’t wash anything with wheels and if people call in wanting only a deck washed let them know we don’t do that either. She still sends the leads with a note saying they told them exactly that. I love it.
Can you add multiple numbers for tracking roi of different marketing avenues? I’m using godady SmartLine but I have no way to differentiate whether they come from organic SEO, AdWords, print, etc
