Leads at Mosquito Squad
The home services industry generally considers a lead a contact who has been discovered as a potential customer. At Mosquito Squad, we generate leads through a variety of sources. This article outlines the lead flow, defines our language for such leads, and points out best practices for nurturing them into customers.
Leads and Conversions within the Mosquito Squad System
Lead flow comes primarily from phone calls and web forms tracked through CallCap and online marketing vendors. Since the adoption of CallCap in 2023, all leads come through CallCap. A few leads come through other sources, e.g., a friend calls the owner on a personal cell phone.
Online Marketing Dashboards need to be considered call-tracking reports rather than lead reports. They contain solicitations, wrong numbers, employee calls, etc. Marketing Vendor dashboards are a good indicator of activity but not leads.
Serviceminder and Tableau. Contacts created in Serviceminder are the source for Leads. Leads invoiced in Serviceminder are conversions. Local staff manually enters and curates these from calls. Web leads are automatically entered in Serviceminder but curated by local staff. These are the only two ways leads are created.
Pulse and Tableau can monitor these leads: Leads and Conversion Report, Daily Dashboard, KPI report, and others.
Digital Vendor Dashboards
Online Marketing Vendor Dashboards are a call tracking system, not a lead report. Use them to monitor call and web form activity.
Leads in Service Minder
A best practice in season is to review newly created leads and their sources daily. To do that, open both Serviceminder's Contacts, sorted by the newest Created Date, and the Online Marketing Vendors dashboard. Then, decide whether each lead is qualified.
Leads in Service Minder
Duplicates.
During the weekly season, run the duplicates report and merge down duplicates into a single contact per entity, e.g., husband and wife, two phone numbers/emails. Note: there is an effort in the algorithm that attempts to identify duplicates in Serviceminder, but it could be better, as you might get a contact from a new phone, email, or person at the same address.
Careful: For regulatory reasons, keep different clients at the same address and well-identified as different. For example, move an 'old' client to Cancelled Customers and add a note as 'moved 2021'.
Customer and Conversion Tracking
Online Marketing Vendor Dashboards are best used to gauge your marketing's performance over time and compare between Mosquito Squad locations. Due to the large number of non-qualified leads, online marketing vendor leads are more straightforward to compare directly to Serviceminder than the work described here if this curation process is followed.
If you follow these procedures, pulse in Serviceminder provides an excellent way to monitor your qualified leads and conversions.