small businesses

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.

Is Yelp Doing More Harm Than Good for Your Business? Part 2: Prospect Genius Case Study

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

Last month, we issued a post detailing the problems that the popular site Yelp causes for small, local businesses in all different corners of the country. In today’s followup post, we’ll detail how, like many businesses, Prospect Genius was hit by Yelp’s well meant but poorly executed practices. It was an unfortunate experience, to say the least, but there are some important lessons in our story that are worth sharing.

First, an Overview…

As you know, Yelp is a self-described urban guide that’s predicated on active users and community members voluntarily writing reviews of local businesses. Its purpose is to enable individuals to assess how well other customers fared with nearby companies in terms of service, quality, price, and overall value. Generally speaking, Yelp empowers consumers and helps businesses connect with prospective customers.
However, there’s a major flaw in Yelp’s review system, namely the automated review-filtering software. Intended to improve the reliability of Yelp’s content, it weeds out questionable reviews while keeping seemingly trustworthy ones. When a review is filtered out, its star rating goes with it, leaving zero impact on a company’s rating, for better or worse. While this seems like a good idea in theory, it has actually wound up hurting a great number of users due to an imperfect algorithm that seems to favor negative reviews over positive ones. This is what happened to Prospect Genius’s very own Yelp listing…

How the Issue Transpired

We’ve been in business for over five years now, and we’ve always committed ourselves to providing clients with exceptional service and support. In fact, we are accredited by the Better Business Bureau and maintain an A+ rating.
However, our Yelp listing used to paint a much different picture. As it turns out, a former, disgruntled client decided to spam his own Yelp listings and ours. This is a client who had signed up for our lead generation program three different times for two separate, unrelated businesses. On his own listings, he boldly left glowing reviews without even disguising himself with a different username. These reviews beat the filtering system. Meanwhile, on our listing, using the same name, he wrote a deeply negative and false review, which also made it past the filters.
At the same time, five different, legitimate clients gave us very positive reviews. How many of those made it onto our Yelp listing? Zero. You read that correctly: 100% of our positive reviews were filtered out. This left our listing with a one-star rating and a solitary, terrible review from an angry spammer, while five excellent reviews remained filtered and hidden. As you can guess, we weren’t happy about this.

Our Course of Action in Response

Not prone to ignore blatant injustice, we faced the issue head on. First, we reported our former client’s reviews as spam on his own listing (because that’s exactly what they were). Then, we contacted Yelp’s Customer Service Department and requested that a human, not a robot, look at the reviews on our listing because the automated filter had made an error. In return, we received a form response that explained how the review filter works without providing any semblance of a solution.
At this point, we decided to go one step further and contact the Legal Department, this time with a stronger request: either manually review the results of the filter or remove Prospect Genius completely from the Yelp directory. Rather than comply with our request, their response was to mark our listing as “no index,” meaning that it still exists but cannot be found via search. Obviously, this is not the same as deleting it.

The Less-Than-Agreeable Outcome

As it stands now, our listing still exists on Yelp without being indexed. While you won’t find us by searching for our name, you can view the listing here: http://www.yelp.com/biz/prospect-genius-troy.
The negative review from our former client is no longer anywhere on our listing. One terrific client review with a five-star rating has made it through the filter—but four other positive reviews still remain hidden.
Unfortunately, Yelp’s review filter is here to stay. We can only hope that the software becomes more accurate as time goes on. For now, we’ll chalk this up to a learning experience and use it as an important lesson for small business owners everywhere.

The Lesson to Take Away

While this encounter with Yelp and its Customer Service Department has certainly left a bad taste in our mouth, we’ve at least managed to take away a few lessons—primarily, that you must be vocal and stand up for yourself as soon as you notice a problem. Otherwise, the bad guys (a.k.a. spammers and uncaring corporations) will win. Who wants to live in that kind of world?
The second lesson is a point that we’ve made before, but it bears repeating: Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Unpleasant interactions with former clients and impersonal web directories are bound to happen. That’s why you should always use a variety of websites when marketing your company. Some of our preferred directories include Google+, Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, Citysearch, Local.com, and Angie’s List. When you utilize a handful of different outlets, you’ll prevent your honest advertising efforts from being crippled by any one spammer, nasty competitor, or irate customer.
If you decide to stick with Yelp, just remember, that while it can be a useful tool when the system works in your favor, it also has equal potential to harm your reputation. Stay on top of your listing, watch out for dubious behavior, and report any problems as soon as they appear. If you end up having an experience similar to ours (which we wouldn’t wish on anyone), then you can save a lot of time by directly asking for your company not to be indexed. Yelp won’t delete your listing, but at least others won’t be able to find it without knowing the precise URL.

Get Advice From Prospect Genius

No matter which online business directories you decide to work with, vigilance is your best strategy. But if you see something suspicious and aren’t positive that it should be a red flag, feel free to give us a call! Having gone through this ourselves, we’ll be more than happy to give you our opinion.

Ring, Ring… Part II

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

In our last post, we announced three new features available through our client portal:

Calls by Day of Week
Calls by Hour of Day
Call Length by Hour

These reports provide our clients with valuable information regarding their busiest days in terms of phone traffic, helping them to make informed business decisions to promote the success of their companies. To make all this a little bit less abstract, we’ve created a case study to show you just how valuable this call information can be!

Case Study

So we’re going to take a look at real data from all three reports for one of our actual clients. Let’s call them Flooring Company X.
To start, let’s take a peek at their calls by day of the week:

By looking at this graph, you can clearly see that Flooring Company X receives the majority of their phone calls Tuesday through Friday. They get the greatest number of calls on Thursday, with Friday being a close second.
Now let’s see what time of day the phone is ringing:

You can see that calls start coming in about 9 a.m. and don’t really die off until after 3 p.m. These are prime working hours when the company is most likely on the jobsite and unable to take calls.
Finally, let’s take a look at the number of calls that are being answered versus how many are going to voice mail. The Call Length by Hour report can do a pretty good job of illustrating that info.

This data illustrates that Flooring Company X is only answering their phone at 4 p.m. and catching a couple of calls during the lunch hour. Going back to the second graph, you can see that the bulk of their phone calls are actually coming in between 9 a.m. and noon. However, since this last graph indicates that their call lengths hover under two minutes in those morning hours, you can see that they’re, in fact, missing the majority of their calls.
Unfortunately, chances are that all of those callers who are being sent to voice mail are not leaving a message. Instead, they’re likely to hang up and call a competitor instead. So, it’s important to make sure you prevent that from happening to capture more leads and help your business succeed.

What You Can Do About It

Using the information from these call reports, we’ve developed a couple of recommendations for Flooring Company X that could help their business get ahead. For starters, we’d suggest hiring a part-time receptionist. This receptionist could work Wednesday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., thus covering the company’s busiest call days during their peak calling hours. Having a receptionist on hand to handle the calls means the rest of the crew would be able to concentrate on their work at the job site without having to worry about who’s answering the phone.
However, realistically, we understand that it’s just not feasible for every business to bring in a receptionist. If that’s not a good option for you, setting designated office days and appointment/job site days might be a good alternative. Look at the days with the highest concentration of calls, which for Flooring Company X is Thursday and Friday. Leave those days open to be in the office to answer the phone. Then, since Saturday through Tuesday tend to have lower numbers of incoming calls, it makes the most sense to schedule appointments to do installs and service on those days.
Whatever solution you choose to help you catch more of your calls—one of our recommendations or a solution you devise on your own—your business will benefit. Every call that goes unanswered is a potential job lost, and each potential job that’s lost is a potential paycheck down the drain, too!

One Size Does NOT Fit All

Of course, each and every business is different. Perhaps your company receives the most incoming calls first thing on Monday. Maybe Wednesday afternoon is your busiest call time. Once you’ve checked out your reports in the client portal, you’ll know your business’s specific call patterns and you can create a plan to best accommodate your potential customers. From hiring a receptionist to scheduling strategic office hours to transferring calls to different employees throughout the week or even the day, you can use your company’s incoming call data to boost your business’s success.
Still not sure how to use these reports in the client portal or how to leverage your call data to your company’s best advantage? Just contact us today and we’ll walk you through it!

Ring, Ring… Part I

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

At Prospect Genius, we’ve created a handful of tools that allow us to analyze the performance of our clients’ lead generation campaigns. One of the primary tracking tools used to indicate a campaign’s efficacy is the call report, which provides us with statistics about when and how the customers of our clients are searching for their business. These statistics are broken down by day of the week, hour of the day, and length of the call.
We recommend that every business owner take a few minutes to compile data about each day’s incoming customer calls. Here’s why.

Some Days Mean More Calls

After taking a peek at our Calls by Day of Week tracker, we found that many businesses received a major increase in incoming calls on one particular day of the week.
Since many businesses receive the most telephone traffic on a specific day of the week, this means it’s extra important to be available to take calls on that particular day!
For example, across the paving industry, Monday had the highest volume of calls, at nearly 30%.

However, for the roofing industry, Tuesday had the greatest number of calls, with 27% coming in on that day.

With Saturday and Sunday being the two slowest days for call traffic in both industries, people seem to be waiting for the beginning of the work week to call and schedule their service needs (likely to avoid emergency/weekend service fees). If you miss calls on Monday or Tuesday, you could be missing out on a ton of appointments! Potential customers aren’t likely to leave a voice mail or to call back—when you don’t pick up your phone, they are probably calling your competitor next!
Your particular business might be experiencing different results from the roofing or paving industries, so it’s important to keep track of your incoming calls to understand what your specific call patterns look like.

Strategically Managing Call Volume

Are you too busy to answer the phone? Hire a receptionist! You could bring someone in part time to answer the phones and schedule appointments on your busiest days.
Every business is different, so you should be keeping track of the day and time of all of your customer calls. These metrics can help you determine not only which days, but also what time of day you’re receiving the most incoming calls, so you can plan accordingly to maximize your company’s success!
Be sure to stay tuned for more details on how you can apply this data to help your business get ahead. Our next blog post will be Part II of this discussion. We’ll take a look at a case study to help you understand how to make business decisions using information like which days and times you receive the most calls.
As always, if you have questions, please contact us. We’ll be happy to talk to you about your call data and what it can mean for your business!

Are You Spending Too Much Time Keeping Track of Your Online Presence?

Last Updated: February 15, 2024

If you’re a savvy business owner with a Google Places listing and some form of an online advertising campaign, then you should be constantly aware of how your efforts are holding up in order to ensure . However, as you’re probably starting to realize, trying to keep your online advertising efforts on track is practically a full-time job all on its own. Whether you’re contending with the powers-that-be at Google or trying to grasp exactly how valuable your advertising campaign is, it takes a great deal of time and energy to manage your online presence effectively. Fortunately, Prospect Genius has developed a couple of brand-new, time-saving solutions to help you track your Google listings and rankings with as much simplicity and convenience as possible.

Fighting With Your Google Listing?

As you’ve probably discovered by now, dealing with Google is not always easy. Even if you’re able to understand and abide by all of Google’s ultra-specific rules, there are certain events and actions that you simply cannot predict or prevent. If you have a Google Places account and you’re managing it on your own, then it might be difficult to know how to deal with unforeseen complications, such as:

Disappearing listings
“Hijacked” listings
Inaccurate information
Lost information

When your Google Places listing has been duplicated, merged, or otherwise tampered with, it could be due to several different factors. Whether an old listing from a former advertising company has resurfaced, a competitor has been tampering with your listing, or Google has made an erroneous update to your listing automatically, there are countless outside forces that can and will make it difficult for you to maintain an accurate, optimized Places listing.
Regardless, it’s vital that you stay on top of any changes that are made to your listing. Why? Listings that have been merged or duplicated can cause your Google rankings to drop, while inaccurate information (e.g. that your business is closed) can cause you to miss out on new customers. It’s especially important to monitor customer reviews, as some dishonest competitors might leave fake complaints on your listing. Any changes made to your listing may become permanent once they’re left for a certain period of time, which is why it’s so vital that you’re always aware of what’s happening with your listing.

The Solution: MapTrax™

Prospect Genius recognizes that effectively managing a Google Places account is a complicated undertaking. That’s why we’ve developed a program that monitors your listing daily and alerts you of any changes automatically. Called MapTrax, this state-of-the-art system will help you keep track of any changes made to your company’s name, URL, phone number, address, and more, so you can immediately address any problems that arise. Essentially, MapTrax is very reasonably priced insurance that will save you time, money, and future business.

Constant Monitoring Is a Huge Time Drain

If you’re serious about the success of your business, then you probably have at least one online advertising company working for you. In fact, some ambitious business owners hire several companies at once. No matter how many advertising campaigns you have, you’ll naturally want to keep track of how each one is performing in order to ensure that they are being associated with the appropriate keywords (i.e. search terms) and that they are actually valuable to your company.
Unfortunately, monitoring the performance of each individual campaign can prove to be a very time-consuming and confounding process, especially when you have other projects and obligations to complete. As you may already know, repeatedly Googling the same thing from the same computer can skew your results. That’s because Google keeps track of the search history that’s associated with your IP address and will begin to customize your results accordingly. As you can imagine, if this is the only measurement that you have to judge your campaign’s performance, then you might end up making a decision based on faulty information. This can be especially costly if you fire a company that’s actually working or, alternately, if you keep a company that’s not working at all.

The Solution: AdTrax™

The only truly effective and objective way to measure your campaign’s performance is to use a non-biased, auto-generated monitoring system. For this reason, the experts at Prospect Genius have created AdTrax, a system that allows you to see where each of your URLs are ranking for each keyword, all in one convenient location. Once you log on, you’ll be able to see your advertising campaign’s raw, unfiltered results, no matter what time of day or night. AdTrax will track your results over time and produce a graph of your performance that’s simple to read and easy to understand.
If you think that your company’s advertising efforts could benefit from MapTrax, AdTrax, or both, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re offering both features at a reduced rate for the next 30 days, so act now!

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