How to Reach the Right Audience for Your Home Services Company

Jeff Lambert (: 00:01

Who is your ideal customer? What insights do you have about the people that you're trying to sell to? How can you take that information and give it to the people that are trying to sell your service or product in a way that's going to boost your leads and your revenue? We have some of the answers to that on today's show, Built to Scale.

Jeff Lambert (: 00:30

Hello everybody and welcome to Built to Scale, the show specifically designed to help home services companies be able to increase their leads and scale their revenue. I'm your host, Jeff Lambert. Today, we're going to be talking about a very important foundational principle that we want to make you aware of as you start to grow and really diversify your sales and marketing efforts, and to help cover that topic. I've invited the CEO of Rizen into the studio. His name is Rogelio Rodriguez. Rod, thanks for coming over today.

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 00:58

Thanks for having me, Jeff. I'm thrilled to be here.

Jeff Lambert (: 01:00

You know, even though it's digital, it's a, it's always a good thing when we can have you come on, you've been doing this for a long time and you've worked with a lot of different businesses in the home services industry. And I know a place that we like to start with them is building something called buyer personas. Now that may be a new term, but the reason I want us to start here, and this is really the goal, the overall goal of our show is we start, we want to make these episodes actually useful for you, the listener, where instead of just inviting people on randomly to do interviews and you finish the episode and you're like, "okay, well, that was great for them." We want to actually give you the tools and strategies and resources. So you can actually go out and be like, Hey, I know how to do this. Now I'm going to start implementing this. Or I'm going to give this to someone in my office to be able to handle and actually do something with the information we're giving you. So we're starting off with a foundational principle about growing your business. And that's speaking to the right customer. There's so many businesses out there that don't bother to think about who their audience is.

Jeff Lambert (: 01:58

They're just putting out advertisements and hoping, whoever decides to look at it, whether it's a billboard or a flyer, or even those little cards that people hand out at stoplights. Sometimes that's very popular down here in Miami. That's great. And all, but if you don't know who you're trying to reach, and you don't know who they are, what they like, what they don't like, what their problems are. You just you're really throwing money out the window and study after study shows the importance of figuring out who the heck your audience is before you start investing in advertising. And you may be sitting there right now as an owner of one of these companies that can wait, I'm doing all those things. I have a billboard, I hand out these door knockers and that's great. But what we're saying is you really need to stop and think about who is my target buyer. And so we're going to talk about developing those today and building what we call buyer personas. So let's take a step back rod, and let's talk a little bit about this term buyer personas. We use it as marketers speak, but it's really important to grasp and start using. So I guess from like a meta standpoint, what is a buyer persona and why is it important to com services companies?

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 03:01

So a buyer persona is a somewhat fictitious multi-dimensional profile of your ideal customer in the office. We like to give the buyer persona catching name. It makes the Meda person seem real to everybody in the customer facing teams. And we found that it really, it helps adopt an understanding of who these people are, right? Because your teams will use the buyer persona as a guide on how to best develop and keep positive relationships with your customers and then developing the buyer persona. It's important because it ensures that all your teams are focused on the wants and needs of your ideal customer. And it drives the alignment of your entire team. Absolutely. And I guess as an example, like maybe for one that we've developed for a roofing contractor, we might give them the name "Horatio Homeowner," and everybody in that profile, we've done research and pulled together statistics and feedback that shows, okay, this is what your average homeowner in our area likes, dislikes what their needs are, what their problems are. And that helps with the advertising and the marketing and the sales pitches and the consultations, because you've already got kind of a cheat sheet about what they, what they want and what they need. So, absolutely, I think you hit on the importance of it. You should know who the heck you're talking to and that's important to develop.

Jeff Lambert (: 04:16

So let's go into the nitty gritty of what a buyer persona should look like. Right? What should a good buyer persona include? What does that look like in terms of details?

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 04:25

Sure. Good buyer personas should include as much data as possible about the customers your company has successfully worked with, right? They're best built using historical data, like the results of customer interviews, general knowledge about the people your company works with while they may be tempting to create multiple buyer personas. Since you have multiple customers, it is best to stick with just one buyer persona that is based on your ideal customer. You can have maybe three, you know, uh, pushing it, but really the more precise you are, the better it is for your individual company and the faster you're going to grow. Right. It's kind of like an, like creating a niche and, um, having 1% of that's going to unify that service, right? That each of your companies, teams will be able to provide even more data on how they interact on a daily basis. And it's going to give, uh, an overall streamlined and efficient experience from beginning to end because your communication is going to fit the style of what, how that individual wants to interact with you and communicate with you best.

Jeff Lambert (: 05:26

Absolutely. You know, and I'm thinking you have to think about your service off the top for most home services companies that we work with. They usually either primarily deal in residential properties or are they deal with commercial properties. And so those are two very different groups that you're speaking to. And so what works for, for the homeowner is not necessarily going to work for the property manager or the contractor. So all great points, rod, it is important to start off by developing one, you got to think about who your main target market is. And then I guess let's, let's go into some details about what's on that buyer persona. I know we usually start with, with what are the challenges that we know that people in your target audience are facing?

Jeff Lambert (: 06:05

So if they're homeowners, what are some of the things they're looking for? If you're an impact window installer, what's the most important thing a challenge could be not having enough time to be able to call people to set up consultations. That could be an issue, maybe not knowing anything about windows and what the needs are when you live in a certain area. If you live in Miami, your window needs are going to be a bit different than if you live in Northern Michigan, there's going to be a difference there. And so thinking about those things are very important challenges. What are some other things that usually you would include on a buyer persona, besides obviously the problems you think that they need address?

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 06:42

I mean, I can go into a mirror out of things, but what we look for are elements that push someone to search for your service, right? So what caused them something happened right? Again in Florida for impact windows. Typically people are either putting up shutters or they're putting up wood in order to protect our windows from getting shattered from projectiles that gets spun out in the middle of a hurricane. So a lot oftentimes when that happens or hurricane passes, people look for that protection and then they look for replacing their windows for something that's a lot stronger, right? That's an example of Bush. We also look for things that attract them, right? Oftentimes homeowners are going to be attracted by reviews from other members or other customers. They're going to be perhaps maybe the code of ethics or the actual code of conduct for a company may attract them as well, because they want to do business with them.

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 07:36

They may see them everywhere as well and adds, uh, that's another attracting factor. We also want to understand how, what, what causes them anxiety to do business, right? Is it price? It could be the price. It could be the way the sales person handled the consultation, or they didn't get back to them in a, on a, on a certain time. So we try to find and understand that those, those points to better communicate with them and, and head off any problems that the homeowner may have, or, or that target market may, may have. And lastly, I would say impact, right? So what's the result of them interacting with your service. So is it a brand new bathroom for those that remodel, right? Uh, people that are a lot happier in their home because of that remodel, or do they feel safer from hurricanes? Do they feel safer because people can't break in because the windows are impact now.

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 08:27

So all these different elements we think through, and, and we put that together into that, into that avatar, right? That we, that we call, uh, that we're talking about, right? You said Horatio, homeowner or homeowner, how right. I think I have it in my notes, but all this information and the demographic information that you have about the person, right? Like information about where they live, the area, income information, family size, all that is very important to understanding the needs and wants of our customers so that then we can create this, this homeowner, Hal or Horatio homeowner persona. So that then the entire team is in line with understanding that person and being able to serve them. And that may sound really intimidating to people who are listening to this who have never developed the buyer persona. Like where do I get that information? How do I find out what the actual challenges are, or the needs, or the demographic information that can feel very intimidating to collect?

Jeff Lambert (: 09:22

And you mentioned it before, you can get a lot of that information just by including the people in your company who are working with past customers and past consultations. You can have a lot of information sitting in your office right now that you may not even realize you have. So it's a matter of getting all that together. So I guess for someone who's starting the process, and they're just wanting to build a first buyer persona, right? Who should they include in the persona creation process? They want to make sure that they're getting all the information they might already rehab. So where do you start? Who do you include in that process? The building, I would start with customer facing teams, right? CSRs or customer service representatives. People who answer the phone, the salespeople, that's probably a good start, but anybody who has an interaction with a customer should be able to provide you data and different points of views from different stages in the customer's journey with your company, it'll help you make your buyer persona a complete customer, right?

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 10:18

A complete imaginary profile of that individual. So like I said, sales, customer service teams. They can give you input on personality traits, habits, their favorite customers, finance team might be able to tell you which type of customer is most profitable, right? So which ones you want to go after and attract more of. And ideally you get all your teams to answer simple questions about the best type of customer they deal with. So then you can take that information and aggregate it and make decisions based on the analysis that you gather of the data you gather. Once I create that buyer persona, you know, I go into my data and I found out, you know, these are the major counties that I'm getting business from me. Like you said, I'm getting my team together from sales, from customer service, from support. And they're giving me a picture of, well, we speak to this type of person ask most often, this is how they've found out about us.

Jeff Lambert (: 11:09

Whether it's a calling a phone number or clicking on a digital ad, we know this about them as a commonality, you get all that information together and you build the initial buyer persona. That's great is that it is, is at the end of the job. Should there be some sort of updating process to the buyer personas that you create? Well, humans are consistently changing their wants and their needs, and they're growing as individuals. So your approach to building a buyer persona should reflect that, right? I think there's a changes in taste, changes in income as, as, as we grow older as well. So all of these need to be taken into, into account, right? Like right now we're experiencing more and more millennial home buyers that are going into the market. And we need to start thinking about what their thoughts and wants and the way that they want to approach be approached.

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 11:59

Right. They don't prefer calls. Like they just, they ignore calls. And if you leave a voicemail, they may not check it. Right. I mean, I'm in that crowd, right? I don't check my voicemail rarely. So you better text me. Right. That's that's the way I prefer to be approached. So therefore, as we say, see these behavioral changes, we need to be able to also continually tweak the profile of the virus. I know that we're creating, I would say at the very least once a year, you know, oftentimes we look at it probably on a quarterly basis to see for still in line with the people that we want to try to attract. Right. But there's also changes in technology in the way that we interact with each other competitors. All these things may affect your business and customers. So it's best to just stay apprised of everything that's going on.

Jeff Lambert (: 12:45

And on top of understanding your customer, because the more you understand your customer, the more business you'll be able to develop. Absolutely. And I'm going to include this in the show notes, right? This just came into my head. One of our clients, who's an impact window installer. We just helped them publish a study on the needs and wants of millennial home buyers. And we just put that up on their site. So I'll include a link to that study. They're actually using that to try and attract millennial home buyers, to wanting to install impact windows. But it's not just impact windows. It goes into a much deeper, like you said, view of what is, what is today's homeowner want? Because that is millennials. Now they're the market that's buying houses. So you need to realize what do they want, what do they need? And it's not the same as their parents.

Rogelio Rodriguez (: 13:25

It's very different. So we'll include that in the show notes as well. You know, overall folks, this is just a basic overview of why buyer personas are important. You may feel a little bit overwhelmed by the fact that, you know, oh, where do I start with this? I got to sit down and draw this out on a piece of paper. Don't worry. We have you covered. We created some tools for you to get started and hit the ground running. If you feel like this is something you need, and if you feel like this is something you don't need, I would invite you to hit pause, put the scrubber ball or all the way back to zero and start this episode again, because I think you need to hear the reasons once more, why you should have a buyer persona. So for the rest of you that get it and you understand, yeah, I should probably do this.

Jeff Lambert (: 14:03

This is important. We have some resources that we're going to include in the show notes. The first one is we have a full buyer, persona creation, toolkit that you can use to be able to really build from scratch. We put it all in a nice slide, deck, PowerPoint or Google slides. And you can insert the information right there. Like it shows you the categories and you can get your team together in a meeting and actually go through and say, okay, well, what about this? And what about this? And it will actually help you build your first buyer persona from scratch. And so you don't have to think about how to do it. It's right there for you and it's free. So you can download that. The other thing that we've included is we've done the research for you on a national level, and we've created three completely finished buyer persona profiles that you can look at and adjust based on your region, because there are a lot of similarities between homeowners in the United States.

Jeff Lambert (: 14:53

And there's a lot of similarities between contractors in the United States. There are some things that are going to differ slightly based on if you live in the Southwest or the Northeast, but you can take this buyer persona this fully completed one, and use that information, the demographic information, the challenges, information, and kind of plug and play this applies. I know this applies. Now, this doesn't really apply to our region and that's going to help you fill out your first buyer persona even more quickly and give you that, that data, that solid data that we've collected for you to be able to finish that process. So all of that is in our show notes. You can get started today, right now, park the car, pull it over, download it, send it to your office, tell him, Hey, listen, this is priority. Hey, get started on it. We've given you everything you need to get going. And that's really what this show is all about. Right? Right. Absolutely. Action. Take action. Download your a risen buyer persona kit and, uh, get started now. That's right. So rod, thank you so much for coming on the show and taking some time to discuss buyer personas with us. Thanks again for having me Jeff and to our listeners. Thank you so much

Jeff Lambert (: 15:54

For tuning in. We're really grateful that you've decided to make us a part of your day. Remember you can tune in weekly for new episodes and we're going to be here continuing to work hard for you. This podcast is brought to you by risen a revenue growth firm focused on helping home service companies like yours. We've helped clients and impact windows, garage doors, each back, mold remediation, and more grow year over year predictably and safely. Learn more about how we can help you by visiting www dot [inaudible] dot com. That's risen with the Z. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you on the next episode.