Imagine a roofer.

And this roofer does quality work. Leads for the business may come in through:

• Word of Mouth
• Mailers
• Door-to-Door
• Shows (flea markets)
• Advertising

It may seem like these things are disconnected, but they’re closer than you may think.

Here’s why.

You know how streams join together and turn into rivers, right?

Slowly the water heads downstream until it meets up with another and another and they all come into one and turn into a mighty flow of water that will (at some point) feed into the ocean.

Smart home service businesses (like our roofer example) will have multiple channels for bringing in leads.

These streams come together and can really drive the flow of clients into your operation. Eventually those streams and rivers will dump into the ocean of your revenue.

Here are just a couple of broad examples of streams and rivers.

• River: Existing Customers
  • Stream: Upsell/Cross-sell/Recurring payments (via financing)
  • Stream: Referrals from current clients (e.g. word of mouth)

• River: Marketing and Sales
  • Stream: Outbound sales (via door to door, advertising, direct mail, etc.)
  • Stream: Inbound marketing/sales (via email, live chat, product/service education)

It’s an illustration, not science. But you get the idea. Optimize your current streams, add new ones and soon enough you’ll have that river.

Here’s Where Gist Comes Into Play

Gist is an all-in-one tool which helps home service businesses better optimize and harness all of these streams by:

• Automating follow ups with current customers
• Booking and scheduling meetings using live chat, bots and our meeting scheduler tool
• Capturing contact data and nurture leads via email marketing

In this article, I’ll cover an in-depth game plan to start using Gist to get the river flowing.

Hypothetical Situation

You take out an ad, calls come in and visitors show up to your website.

Except, some people visit and/or call “after hours”.

You and your team aren’t there to take the appointment. Or, you don’t have live chat and site visitors take a look and move one to search “roofers near me”.

It happens. But it doesn’t have to (as much).

Follow the plan I’ve laid out here and you’ll be on the way to getting more leads from all of your lead generation efforts.

1 First Things First, Set Up Live Chat

Having live chat on your site is an inbound and outbound tool.

If people search for your services and find you, having live chat there is a fantastic way to start the conversation. And if you sent out a cold email, many times a prospect may check out all of the links in your email signature before they make an effort to reply.

And last time I checked, having conversations with potential customers is a priority for a business like yours.

Live Chat set up is a breeze, especially if you’re using WordPress.

Just login to your WP Dashboard, install the Gist plugin, go to “Settings” > “Gist” and put in your workspace ID from the Gist dashboard.

The Live Chat will now be on your site.

You can go into the Messenger settings and change the appearance to match your brand. If site visitors start a conversation with you, it will show up in the “Conversations” tab of your Gist dashboard.

Note: You may notice that live chat is not on our blog content. We do this on purpose and you can also set the display conditions for your live chat.

Now, It’s Time to Start the Conversation (with Chat Prompts)

Sure, those who are really interested may click on the chat icon. But most people will not start the conversation.

To get those visitors talking, you’ll need a chat prompt.

I recently wrote a deep look into creating a prompt. Essentially, it’s like a store owner greeting someone who walks into their shop.

The Gist: Within 2 minutes of signing up a trial, you can use live chat on your website. Our chat prompts can even start conversations with all of your new visitors.

2 Next, Start Booking Meetings

Decision makers are busy people.

Even if you can get them to agree to chat, it’s hard to nail down a solid time. It’s for these reasons, meeting schedulers were invented. And it’s been a wonderful tool.

They’re so wonderful, that Gist comes with our very own Meeting Scheduler tool on all of our plans.

All you have to do is connect your Google Calendar and set up your meeting preferences (which you can access in “Profiles and Preferences” in the upper right of your Gist dashboard).

It’s once you have the meeting link the magic happens.

Here’s why.

A meeting link is one tool that can be used in multiple situations.

• Email Outreach: Put a meeting link in the P.S. to capture prospects who are ready to talk.
• Live Chat: Book meetings and turn chats into full-blown demos/sales calls.
• Bots: Gist offers a few types of bots, including a meeting scheduler to book calls when you’re not available via live chat.

The Gist: For most home services, it’s about getting to the home and giving an estimate. Booking estimates usually involves a phone and a calendar. Our meeting tool allows you to book appointments right from live chat.

3 Then, Create a Chat Bot

What happens when you’re not there?

Site visitors (aka potential customers) will move on and keep searching.

If you and your team are in the office, you can make yourself available via live chat or having your number right there for a quick call.

But during the off-hours, people can still come to your site. Could be a decision maker from a different country, or just someone who’s working late.

Here’s the thing, you can have a virtual rep that is available to talk 24/7. In other words, a Chat Bot.

No, you don’t have to know how to code. Gist has a couple different bots for our Support and All-in-One plans.

Starting with the Support plan ($29/mo for 5 users), you can get a qualification bot which asks certain questions to your prospects to help you separate prospects (those genuinely interested) and suspects (leads who won’t likely buy).

Questions like:

• How many employees at a company?
• Current solution for target industry?
• Looking for a new solution?

These are likely questions your reps will work into a conversation on the phone or over live chat. The bot can get to the point and ask these questions to new site visitors who initiate the conversation.

For Gist’s Pro plan users, your bots can actually book calls for you and your team!

In addition to the automated booking bot, you can create custom bots to do things, like answer frequently asked questions.

The Gist: When potential leads call on nights and weekends, they usually book with the first person to respond. You can use our chat bot tool to create a 24/7 booking bot within about 15 minutes and you’ll always be the first to respond.

4 Finally, Start Using Email

Gist has Live Chat, Meetings and Chat Bots. And we’re also a full-fledged Email Marketing tool (not to mention several other tools)!

As a home service, you may understand the power of content and inbound marketing. (If not, don’t worry. You can still use Gist’s email marketing.)

Working hard to provide resources (like this one, to be honest) isn’t going to do you any good if the right people don’t get to it.

If you’re reading this very article, it’s likely because you’ve signed up for a free plan for Gist and are in the onboarding sequence. (Notice, how we’ve segmented it for different verticals like B2Bs, SaaS and more.)

All of the aforementioned nurturing is via our drip campaign feature in the email marketing tool.

But what if you’re just doing outbound.

Either way, an email marketing tool is vital for your success.

No, I’m not going to try to sell you on inbound. If you’re having success with outbound sales already and don’t want to add inbound, that’s totally up to you.

But what about referrals?

Using behavioral emails (another Gist email feature), you can set an email to automatically send to every new client after a few weeks. The email asks them to set you up with any colleagues that could use your services.

Doing this automates your referral system, making it a stable stream of lead generation.

The Gist: Too many home services do one job and then you never hear from that customer again. Gathering email addresses can boost your revenue by recommending regular maintenance, check in for other projects and even get referrals.

Next Steps for Using Gist

These first 4 steps are designed to give you the most bang for your buck starting out with Gist.

That said, there are a number of features we didn’t cover. Again, I suggest getting the steps above up and running first. Then, check out a few of these.

• Marketing Automation (and Workflows): Essentially a visual workflow builder showing how and when new users get certain emails, start campaigns and make changes based on behaviors (like when leads become customers).
• Support Tools: Gist has a Help Desk and Knowledge Base to explain complex features and make sure your customers become diehard fans.
• Event Tracking: See every interaction with visitors, leads and current customers on your site. Then, use the data to better automate.

I really hope this article helps you utilize Gist to gather the streams and have success in your company.

Happy Hunting.