Alex Malone and the team at Leap Partners know they lucked out with their first-ever acquisition.
It happened last March, right after Leap, a Nashville-based HVAC and plumbing consolidation platform, formed. The company was on a mission to connect the best residential and small commercial HVAC, plumbing, and electrical businesses in the Southeast.
That first-acquired company was Conditioned Air Solutions in Huntsville, Alabama. Why was it lucky?
“They were (already) on ServiceTitan and a light user of Marketing Pro,” said Malone, VP of marketing business development at Leap.
This meant that Leap would be introduced to the capabilities of a software that could power all aspects of a business, as well as an all-in-one marketing automation solution for the trades. Marketing Pro leverages customer data and supercharges a contracting business with more calls, booked jobs and higher customer spend.
Having used marketing tools in previous jobs, Malone and his cohorts had never seen anything quite like it.
“In the past, all of the marketing automation had to be done as a tack-on,” Malone said. “It was always this really tough puzzle of trying to keep data up to date, keep unsubscribes up to date on the transactional side and the promotional side, and keep all the data up to date if an email was updated here.
“(Now with Marketing Pro), it's nice to have all of this be a one-stop shop.”
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Reviews
When Malone worked in the home security industry, he built a marketing tack-on to the company’s software platform. One challenge with it? Sending out reviews.
“It was too taxing via the API to do real-time review invites after a job was closed,” Malone said. “So every four hours, we'd do a bulk check. And the best we could ever get at my old company was around a 3% to 4% response rate.”
Now with Marketing Pro?
“We're averaging a 10% response rate,” Malone said.
What’s the major difference? Marketing Pro’s customer engagement tools.
Drive customer engagement: Generate more quality reviews through automated review requests. Improve search rankings and build customer trust by making sure both your reviews and listings accurately reflect your business.
Automated reviews are a game-changer, Malone explained. At his previous job, there was such a delay from the close of a job and the technician leaving the house to the customer eventually receiving the review.
“The customer is busy, they go on leading their normal lives and completely forget about what the technician asked them to do, like, an hour ago,” Malone said.
Automated reviews have made a concrete difference at Conditioned Air. When Leap first acquired the HVAC company, it was averaging only around 10 reviews per month.
“Then all we did was turn on the auto review feature, and then we told the head of that group to tell the technicians to make sure to give the customer a heads-up (that a review request) was coming.
“Over the last three months, it’s now 50 reviews a month versus 10,” Malone said.
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Email Campaigns
Crystal Wexler, Leap’s marketing manager, helps companies integrate into Leap’s marketing ecosystem and works with them to generate qualified leads.
She’s been in the marketing and branding industry for 11 years and, along with Malone, has experienced firsthand limitations of marketing platforms at former jobs.
One of those limitations has been within email marketing.
Email: With Marketing Pro, businesses can automatically follow up and generate opportunities with email marketing. They can reach existing customers and generate more opportunities by building hyper-targeted audiences, automating email campaigns and tracking true ROI—all from one place.
"ServiceTitan Marketing Pro has been a very helpful tool for us in evaluating our performance for all six companies that we manage marketing for,” Wexler said. “Our prime KPIs we use to evaluate our performance is ROI and cost per lead. Marketing Pro gives us the ability to further track down the funnel and get a more accurate ROI and overall cost per lead.”
The best example comes from Conditioned Air.
This year, from February to April, the Alabama HVAC company generated a 2,080% ROI with email marketing using Marketing Pro—yes, you read that right.
“That's pretty incredible,” Wexler said.
It’s an exciting development, and one that Wexler is hopeful can be replicated at Leap’s other companies.
Customer information
Since that first acquisition almost one year ago, Leap is now up to seven.
Many of these companies have a lot in common, like successful and passionate business owners who are looking to scale. But soon after they partner with Leap, they share another aspect.
“Number one, (they) make an investment in ServiceTitan,” Malone said. “We see ServiceTitan as the anchor for us to quickly dive into these companies and be able to add value to these owners and remove a lot of the burden from their shoulders.”
One added value with Marketing Pro is it helps Leap’s seven companies uncover the most important data: accurate customer information.
Hyper-target your audience: Create audiences based on customer information that you already have in ServiceTitan—like unsold estimates, aging equipment, and memberships that are expiring. This information automatically updates in real time. Send one postcard or thousands via a direct mail campaign, or “set and forget” your email campaigns.
“That's the thing that attracted me most (to Marketing Pro)—if a customer calls in and schedules an appointment or calls in and updates their email because they didn't pay their invoice and we had the wrong email on file, we get to benefit from the fact that the minute that's updated and then we send a campaign out, we don't have to constantly reconcile between two different databases,” Malone said.
Wexler and Malone will continue leaning into the features that Marketing Pro and ServiceTitan offer, like ads and direct mail.
“We're trying to use the platform as much as possible, and we would love to always be on the bleeding edge of trying all of the new features,” Malone said. “We believe it's going to really be a differentiator for us.”
ServiceTitan Software
ServiceTitan is a comprehensive software solution built specifically to help service companies streamline their operations, boost revenue, and substantially elevate the trajectory of their business. Our comprehensive, cloud-based platform is used by thousands of electrical, HVAC, plumbing, garage door, and chimney sweep shops across the country—and has increased their revenue by an average of 25% in just their first year with us.
