Transcript
Joe Troyer: Next up. Next up. We’re talking about pay per call. With pay per call, what makes a call billable? At the end of the day, folks, I want you to know that this is my opinion on how I would approach the market. This is not a set in stone thing. Okay, let me explain. Traditionally, if I can spell … actually, let’s do this instead. Pay per call networks. The way that they bill versus going to direct to local business. Let’s talk about this so that you guys understand the difference. Pay per call networks are going to, they’re going to pay you out based upon duration. They’re going to say duration is greater than 90 seconds and probably what they aren’t going to tell you … let’s do this. Duration is greater than 90 seconds. What they probably aren’t going to tell you is that they’re treating, that they call … this is their language. I don’t like their language. They’re treating the calls.
Joe Troyer: What they mean by that is that they’re pushing the caller through, at minimum, one IVR. An IVR is like, “Hey, press one for residential. Press two for commercial. Okay. Press three for this type of roof. Press four for that type of roof. For any other type of roof, please press five.” Do you guys like when you are on a phone call and they’re treating the calls? Give me some feedback in the chat. How many of you guys get really fricking annoyed? How many of you guys just hang up the fricking phone? You’re like, “Oh my gosh. They’ve asked me five questions. Can’t I just talk to somebody?” Understand. Yeah. Understand that you guys aren’t alone. That’s normal behavior. In fact, with every treatment of a call, with every IVR key press, you’re going to lose statistically about 20% of your callers. This is a big deal. This is a really, really big deal. Statistically, you’re going to lose this on each and every one of the treatments that you offer.
Joe Troyer: If you’re doing pay per call, I just got to be honest, you don’t want these treatments. You want it to ring direct to somebody that can answer the phone. This also goes for you call and somebody picks up the phone and it’s like, “To help service you better, help direct you to the best representative, please enter your zip code.” Same thing, right? It’s an IVR. It’s a key press. It’s that prompt. Pay per call networks, this is going to be … these are going to be their main two criteria and then their third criteria is that it’s from a billable, or in network, zip code. That simply means that wherever it is that your caller’s calling from and wants help from or their house is from as far as zip code that they’ve sold and that they can service.
Joe Troyer: Yeah. Douglas says, “Between IVR having a long message about hours of operation and location and everything else before I talk to a person, I really hate it.” Yeah. Understand that’s how it works with people, the leads that you’re generating as well. This is what makes a pay per call network offer billable, so to speak. Let’s not say billable. Let’s just say in network zip code, okay. Then, when we’re working with a local business, and we’re selling direct, instead of going to one of these pay per call networks, and let’s say that the price on a qualified call here is 12 bucks over here. I can get no joke, like 90 bucks. That’s the reason why we go direct and why we go sell the local business is because we will literally make six, seven, eight, 10, even 15 times the income if we sell the deal correctly.
Joe Troyer: Now I’ve done a ton of videos about how to sell pay per call deals correctly. Most people that I see and that I talk to and that I start coaching are still selling deals ass backwards. Go look on the channel, go look on the blog on how to sell pay per call deals correctly. We do that by doing a pay per click ad spend test or a 30-day test. Look up those keywords and you’ll find that training. This will ensure that you have the least skin possible off of your back, so to speak, and you have the best price per call possible. You know, without a shadow of a doubt, and you’ve proven it, that you can fulfill for the customer. That’s why we go direct to business, versus pay per call. When we look at these two criteria, when I go to a local dentist and I tell the local dentist that I’m gonna have, you know, calls coming in or I want to sell him pay per call, and I go directly after this number and I tell him that the call is billable based upon a duration.
Joe Troyer: Immediately, we’re having an adversarial conversation. Immediately, we’re butting heads. We’re smacking head-on into each other. The only thing that he can think of is, “Well, that’s not fair. If I don’t have a chance to convert the customer, why should I pay for it?” Folks, I’ve dealt with this so many times, even with big professional companies. They don’t know what percentage of calls that they’re answering, and that … all that they can think about is that you’re screwing them with this duration. Does that make sense to everybody joining us live on the call right now?
Joe Troyer: I’m going to tell you guys how to get around this and I’m gonna teach you guys how I get even more favorable terms. What I mean by that is I end up getting more calls that are qualified when I go to direct local businesses, because I’m able to pitch terms that actually end up penciling out to me and making me more qualified calls. Then obviously I’m also charging five, six, 10 even 15 times the amount per call. Does that sound like it’s worth your time watching the rest of this video right now? I’m asking. You guys are live. I need some feedback. For those of you guys watching the video on YouTube or on the blog, you can still type in a comment. That’d be great so I can see it. Pat on the back. Hell yeah. All right, so this is what we do.
Joe Troyer: We change up the order of these. The first thing that we say is that they are in market, and we define in market as they’re looking for your type of business. If you’re a dentist, they’re looking for a dentist. This does not mean that they are in market looking for one of the only three services that you offer. If they’re highly specialized, we’re going to tell them from the get-go we can’t filter down our calls like that. We don’t serve a percentage of a percentage of a percentage of the market. If you want to play with us, you can’t just cherry pick calls. You’ve got to take all the calls. So that’s a big lesson in and of itself. In market, for us, simply means that they’re looking for your type of business.
Joe Troyer: Then, next, is that they’re in territory. To be clear here, it’s not that they’re in your service area. If I sell pay per call in West Palm Beach here, right down the street from me throwing distance, if I sell pay per calling West Palm Beach, I’m not going to rely on one vendor or one local business to be able to handle my call volume. I want to sell to multiple people so that I diversify. I spread out my risk. I can’t deal with Bob’s Dental servicing five miles from this address. Then I can’t deal with ABC Smiles dealing with a radius of 20 miles around their address. Those practicalities, they don’t work. Does that make sense? Joe says yes. It just doesn’t happen. I’d have to filter out the calls at the beginning and I’d lose 20% of my revenue immediately. No, I’m not doing that. In territory for us means county, county-based. They’re county-based. In West Palm Beach, it’s that the person is in Palm Beach County.
Joe Troyer: For some businesses, just to be frank guys, this is a little bit of a stretch. Palm Beach County is big. It’s a long. There’s lots of little cities and areas and towns in Palm Beach County. For a dentist that people have to drive to, I gotta be frank, I gotta be honest, this can be a bit of a more of a tough sell. That doesn’t mean that we adjust our offer for them. Yeah. Douglas Blot says, “How do you know what county?” By listening to the phone call. By listening to the phone call. They’re going to give them their address as part of their onboarding … 99% of the time.
Joe Troyer: If you’re going to get an objection, “Oh, that’s too far away,” or you’re going to get the address and it’s not going to be the right county. We’re going to learn that, if the company can’t service that person on the phone call. In market, in territory. Then, and notice I put this last, the call has to be over 30 seconds in duration. Notice I don’t bring this up at the beginning. Instead, I say they’re in market. They’re looking for your type of business. They’re in territory. Then I use this as a plus. Plus, the call has to be over 30 seconds in duration because you couldn’t book an appointment in 30 seconds. No. I turn this, I spin this, into a positive.
Joe Troyer: There’s an if here, or there’s an exception here, unless the call goes to voicemail. Folks, at the end of the day, when running pay per call, you know off the top of the bat that, depending on the industry, these numbers are going to change. Let’s say the home services home service industry, you know that there’s going to be a 20 to 30% missed call ratio, where the call goes to voicemail, not because the customer hung up. You can look if you’ve got a good call tracking platform on who hung up the call. It went to voicemail and then they hung up. Or, it rang and rang and rang for 10 minutes and nobody answered. If that happens, I understand that that’s not your problem. You can only control what you can obviously control. We can’t control that.
Joe Troyer: If a call goes to voicemail, we still charge for that, whether the caller leaves a voicemail or not. That’s how we run it. Folks, the reason that we have this criteria in is because this has bitten us in the ass, bitten me in the ass, one too many times. I’ve had people quite literally in one day miss 10 or 15 phone calls. Then you look at, or you think about, how much you’re charging them, whether it’s 90 bucks, 100 bucks or whether it’s big ticket, lead gen, and it’s 400 bucks a call. That’s a lot of money to anybody. That’s not my risk. The business owner, no matter what, if they made a commitment to pay somebody for advertising, this is going to happen no matter what.
Joe Troyer: They’re going to pay for it for call if it goes to the voicemail, no matter what advertising they’re doing. Correct? Correct. When we look at what makes a call billable, this is how we do billing. When we sell direct to local businesses and when we run pay per call folks, I don’t want this. You don’t want to sell to pay per call networks. The only time I ever sell to pay per call networks is when I don’t have an existing direct to local business customer. I use these only when absolutely necessary, because I make a whole lot more money in. That should be obvious in this scenario when I sell direct to local businesses.
Joe Troyer: How do we check each call for the billing criteria? We have somebody actually go through and manually listen to these calls. Home services, for example, phone call duration is probably an average of three minutes. Let’s say that we send over 10 calls that are three minutes. That’s an easy job for the week or for the month for a VA or somebody on our team to audit.
Joe Troyer: It’s not really that big of a deal, but if you take it one step further and you actually start doing this, you start to come up with filters that you can use. You come up with the call was missed and your call tracking platform uses that. You just bill them for a missed call. The call is over the billing criteria. It’s over 30 seconds. Those are the ones that we need to listen to then, that aren’t missed. Great. Then, folks, we don’t have to listen to all three minutes. We can seek through the call. We can say, “Okay. Let’s listen to 30 seconds in, then what happened? All right. Great. Now let’s fast forward, or let’s move to 60 seconds in 90 seconds in. Okay, great. Yup. They’re in territory. They booked a phone call. They definitely want their service done.” That’s billable.
Joe Troyer: It doesn’t really mean that somebody’s listening to the entire phone call is the takeaway that I want you to have. Again, by selling with this criteria versus pay per call networks, I’m actually able to get a lot higher conversion rate from raw call actually into a qualified call for direct to local businesses versus pay per call networks. Then, obviously, that’s one multiple in one lever. The second lever is actually the difference of what we’re able to charge when we go direct versus what the pay per call networks charge. I hope that makes sense.
