James King Baskin runs Outsource Kings a contractor lead follow-up and appointment-setting company to help assist busy contractors and business owners.  Operating out of both Colombia and the Philippines contractors can have a dedicated employee managed or use James' team to manage lead calling.  His book is available on Amazon on how to do it yourself and hire your own appointment setter.  His charity supports children in Colombia and the Philippines.

Gary: Hey, what's going on, DMN8 Nation? It's Gary with DMN8 Partners. I'm here with the DMN8 The Day podcast. Hopefully you're ready to roll today and you're ready to DMN8 the Day. As I've been doing the past couple of weeks, I'm sure you've realized this, if you're watching, we switched up our formats and you're not just hearing my boring ass five days a week, now, bringing on some friends a couple days a week to get their insights, find out how they're DMN8ing in their business, and maybe provide some tips to you, to help you do just that, cause that's what we're here to do. We're help, we're here to help you dominate the day. So, today I have an individual that I met in a mastermind that we were in together and, this guy is first of all, if you're watching this on video on YouTube, you can tell the dude loves some cigars. So, we're instant friends. I haven't talked, I haven't talked to him about his, either love for tequila or bourbon, but I mean, if a dude smokes a cigar, there's gotta be one of those. So we're probably brothers from another mother and just don't know it. But today, today I have, James King Baskin. I'm gonna introduce, right now, and then I'll get in his bio in just a second. But James, welcome to the show, my man. 

James: Hey, thank you for having on Gary. 

Gary: So, James is in a space that, that I love. James is in the telemarketing space. He runs an outsource. He runs Outsource Kings, which is a contractor lead follow up and appointment setting. That helps assist busy contractors and busy owners. He operates out of both Columbia and the Philippines. I'm sure he does that so he can get overseas and get some of that good Tobacco, have a dedicated, he basically helps, contractors either have a dedicated employee managed team or they can use James team to manage lead calling. He has a book available on Amazon on how to do it yourself and hire your own appointment. His charity supports children in Columbia and the Philippines all around. Good dude. And, James, let's talk about using the phone to make some money the best way, in my opinion, wouldn't you say? 

James: Yep. Picking up the phone is where most people fall off, and it's where most of the money's at.

Gary: Yeah. So if you had to guess, regular contractor, you know, we're talk, let's, let's say we talk about a roofer, right? We're talking about a roofing company. Let's say he is, got a couple sales people, five, decent size operation, but it's still not big enough to where he's hands off. He's in control, you know, he's in the field, he's selling, he's doing all that stuff, right? Let's say those five salespeople along with himself is, let's say they're working 50 leads a month. Probably a little high for a roofer, but I'm gonna, I want to use numbers that I can multiply and divide easily. Okay. So we'll say 50. What percentage of those do you think are getting missed, because him or his team aren't doing adequate follow up?

James: So 50 leads per guy, or 50 leads total per for the company? 

Gary: For the company, yeah.  

James: So if I had to guess a percentage. I'm well on the bet it's more than half and...

Gary: Really, that high?

James: I think it, there's, so there's a lot of factors that are happening besides just no phone call ever made. So I have data on this, but I don't have an exact number for you, but case by case scenario, and this is a difficult conversation we've had to have with roofers over the years because we've scheduled their appointments and what happens is their sales guys will cherry pick the appoint. And we actually found out they weren't going to certain appointments. So imagine you're the business owner, you're paying thousands of dollars for internet marketing leads or direct mail or telemarketer, whatever kind of lead you have. And then imagine your sales guy is like, oh yeah, they no-showed, meanwhile you've got me the telemarketing company that's doing the lead calling appointment setting. And then we do confirmation calls and we started having people calling back that were saying, "hey, you guys confirmed my appointment, but no one ever showed up." And then they started going to the Facebook page saying, "hey, no one ever came to my house, but they called me." And so I said to myself, "what happened here?" And so that's one factor that that's probably the smaller percent. And I don't know what percentage of that varies on the company. And then based on the sales guys, I'm willing to bet there's probably 20 to 30% that happened. And then the other 10 to 20% is sales guys not going to appointments and then not following up on people that they did meet with. Right. They say the fortune's in the follow up. Everyone always thinks of, well, the lead got generated, that's the follow up. Well, what about after you see the person and the, and the little old lady says, "hey, I'm waiting on the insurance check. I'm meeting with five other roofers." Well, what we found out was most of the roofers, they would put it in their pipeline quoted, and they never followed up with that person. And so that would probably be responsible for even more than 10%. So when I, and now obviously there's always leads that are not gonna be interested and not gonna be good and stuff like that. 

Gary: Sure, sure. 

James: But I'm willing to bet it's, it's around 35 to 50% total that encompass salespeople not showing up, never called back the people that said, "hey, can you follow up with the next week?" They never followed up with that person, or they never even called the lead. And a lot of marketers do audits on their clients, and they just find millions of dollars of missed sales. And so that's kind of where I'm arriving at that number.

Gary: Yeah. I mean, do you think about, you know, cost of a roof and if a roofing company has a 50, let, let, let, let's say they got a 30% close rate, 25% close rate, something like that, you know, five, five potential jobs at a minimum that they're leaving on the table a hundred in revenue...

James: Like 10 to $15,000 for the roof, depending on what kind.

Gary: Yeah, I mean they're, you know, that could extrapolate easily to a million bucks a year just because somebody isn't doing their job. And, I mean, I, I was, I was thinking it was gonna be a big number. Didn't think it would, it could potentially get to seven figures. But I mean, if you're running that kind of operation and just think about the companies that's even bigger, that, that number's probably even more incredible. And I get it, like when you're a single operator, you go out and you try to get everything that you can. You're being aggressive, you're doing that. But as you begin to expand your operation and you have other people that are touching leads, like they're, unless you have a series of checks in place and you are going back and inspecting. Like you are not going to know. And that's where a company like yours comes in. You know?

James: We had a call with a guy, out of Chicago roofer, and this is probably one of the more difficult calls. We were setting appointments. He was working with us and the marketer and he, we informed him of all these jobs that were saying no one ever showed up, and he was like, "well, this is a pretty crappy day." And I said, "well, what's up?" He said, "I got to fire my best friend", and I said, "wow!" He said, "my best friend's not going to the appointments. I gave this guy a job. I gave him a shot to work with me. He complains about the stuff, says that he wants to be door knocking." And I started, I didn't ask him this, but I started thinking about it, if that salesperson's on salary, what incentive do they have to work hard? Of course they want to door knock, they can hang out at McDonald's all day and be like, oh yeah, I set a couple appointments. You know what I mean? Versus having to work an internet lead that's costing a couple hundred bucks an appointment and you're having to spend seven grand plus advertising cost, you know, with a marketer. And you know, it sucks because whenever we find that problem, I know for a fact that they're gonna cancel my service. They're not gonna just be like, "oh, great, can you schedule more appointments for me that my salespeople won't show up on?" They're not gonna do that. They're gonna cancel with me. And so it, I, I'd rather just bring it to awareness now that that's happening with, with sales people in the home services space. 

Gary: Yeah. So, I'm gonna, I'm going to, I'm gonna do a little bit different than I normally do. You know, we usually talk about past history, stuff like that, but this is, this is a really good conversation in terms of, you know, the opportunity that's left on the table or the, you know, we call it the opportunity costs, you know, that kind of thing. But as an entrepreneur, like there's a lot of lessons we learn throughout the journey and obviously, you know, opportunity cost is definitely one of them. What would you say in terms of you personally, what's the biggest lesson you've learned from being an entrepreneur or the biggest takeaway from being an entrepreneur? 

James: Wow, that's a really good question. Biggest takeaway from being an entrepreneur. When, when things get hard not to quit, when things get hard in your industry, whatever industry you're in, and if it's across the board, like it's a hard thing that everyone's dealing with. If you don't quit, you're gonna be the one to go to cause all the people that you know, were getting paid or getting rich when things were. They quit when things get hard. So when things get hard, not quitting and pushing forward as much as it sucks because when you quit, the story's over, the video game is unplugged from the system. But like, if you keep pushing regardless of it's, you know how hard it is. You will win and that there's more success, when things get hard.

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If you want to know more about James Baskin and/or his company Outsource Kings:

https://outsourcekings.com/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-king-baskin-2489a3139/