Automated Follow-up

a.k.a – “The Hopper System”

The hopper system is one of the key secrets of the Monopolize Your Marketplace™ system, and is naturally a key component of the Marketing System for Pool Builders. In a nutshell, the hopper system reaches out and touches all prospects who aren’t quite ready to buy.

Automatic Follow-up System: SET-UP $2,995

Putting your “hopper system” in place includes all of the following:

Hopper system set-up, including import of existing contacts into Hopper database.
Campaign of 4 custom follow-up emails.
Campaign of 4 custom follow-up postcards.
HTML linking of the “contact Us” webform from your website to the hopper system. (The webform will then auto-populate the Hopper system and launch the appropriate e-mail or postcard campaign. It will also send you automatic e-mail notification whenever someone uses the form.)
Quarterly “lead source” reports showing where your leads are coming from.
Management of your hopper system for six months.

It typically takes four to six weeks to implement a new hopper system, presuming you’ve got a decent website person, an official logo, and a good story to tell.

Automatic Follow-up System: Ongoing $49/mo.

Monthly management of the Hopper system involves all of the following:

24/7 tracking and data capture of all leads that come through the website.
Automatic processing of all e-mails and postcards in the campaigns.
Quarterly “lead source” reports showing where your leads are coming from.
Other “ad hoc” reports on request.

After setup of your Hopper system, the first six months are free. The monthly fee starts in months seven.

Why the Hopper System is
so important to pool builders….

An increasingly popular question I’m hearing lately is “How are things going in the rest of the country?” And the answer I’m hearing is pretty much the same: “I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”

What we’re seeing is that the business is still out there, but there’s less of it, and it’s a whole lot harder to get.

It’s kind of like what happens when there are too many lions and not enough antelope. All the lions get hungrier, and a year from now, there won’t be quite as many lions around.

I suppose if you have to choose between being “a hungry lion” and “a lion that isn’t around anymore,” you’ll probably choose “hungry.” So now the key is to control “how hungry?” It’s time to be a smarter, faster, and less-hungry lion.

In 2006, when we were all fat, dumb and happy, my team and I embarked on a marketing test of pool builders in the Austin area. I asked a homeowner / associate in Southern California to call twenty Austin pool builders, and tell them they were moving to Austin to build a house. Texas is hot, so naturally they wanted a pool built with the house. (Very common here.)

The results were shocking at first, but soon confirmed to be commonplace throughout the country.

Nobody follows up!

disastrous-followup

A big fat juicy antelope was moving to Texas with at least half a million dollars in equity. But the lions weren’t hungry, so they didn’t bother with follow-up.

Now, in 2009, builders are paying a lot more attention to follow-up. But not all follow-up is the same. Pestering phone calls are a start, but you could do better. I recommend something more along the lines of a series of informative e-mails, letters and postcards, in addition to the occasional phone call from the sales rep.

hopper-deliverables

Your prospects are much more receptive to this type of info. The cost is insignificant compared to the value. (At a buck a postcard, you’re talking less than $10 per highly-qualified prospect.) And if the pieces are well-written, they will steadily build a case that helps the prospects understand why they’d be a fool to do business with any pool builder other than you.

What this means is that while all the builders continue to fight over the diminishing number of antelope, more and more of the prospects are gently and continually persuaded to do business with you.

And that makes you the smarter, faster, less-hungry lion.