In this episode, John sits down with Tim Geisenheimer from Hatch to break down what it takes to build a winning sales process.

With his background in leading software sales teams, Tim shares how to create successful B2B sales functions and draws on the power of data for targeting the right customers and how technology is changing the game for business operations.

SPECIAL THANKS TO HATCH

Book more leads with the power of Hatch.

Hatch has been an incredible partner in our outbound journey. Since starting with them, we’ve ramped up with powerful automations that keep every lead engaged and every invoice followed up. Hatch’s AI Agents, ready to handle follow-ups, reminders, email blasts, have saved us hours.

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SHOUT OUT TO AVOCA

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Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X

Episode Guest:
Tim Geisenheimer @tgeisenheimer on X

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Owned and Operated Episode #171 Transcript

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Tim Geisenheimer: We have a really exciting product launch coming up. That's going to be, I think, pretty big game changer for the industry.

They can set a hundred demos, but if it's only one qualified opportunity, that's no good, right? Having really buttoned up process, having the right people in place and the right teams and the team structure in place, those will never go out of style.

John Wilson: Earlier this year, we started an outbounding campaign and we really didn't know where to begin. So we were using dialing on the phones. We were sending text messages. We were trying emails. tried a couple different softwares and ultimately we ended up with Hatch. Hatch has been an awesome partner for us.

We started with them about five or six months ago and we've just continued to ramp. Every month we add three or four more automations and my personal favorite thing about working with Hatch is Hatch comes out of the box ready to go. With Hatch you get automated multi touch outreach across text, voicemail drop, email, and a ton more.

So every single lead that you have gets worked, every invoice that you leave gets retouched and rehashed, and It's freaking awesome. Check out usehatchapp.com slash O A O. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. today on the show with me, I have Tim Geisenheimer from Hatch. Welcome

Tim Geisenheimer: to the show. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it, John. I'm looking forward to it.

John Wilson: Yeah, this will be fun. if anyone's been listening, aside from the fact that Hatch has been an awesome sponsor, they're like one of my current favorite. like tech stack tools, because they just help us make a ton of money. we're excited to have Tim on here and I get to pick Tim's brain on a couple of things.

So I'm excited to do this. This'll be fun.

Tim Geisenheimer: I appreciate the support. We've, really enjoyed working with you and, obviously you're using our product as well, which is phenomenal. So yeah, happy to share more. Learn more from you on this, on this conversation. And hopefully we have a good one.

John Wilson: So I'd love it. If you just gave us a little bit of background into yourself, what were you doing pre hatch? What do you do at hatch? like Tim, what do you actually do here?

Tim Geisenheimer: So, I've spent my whole career, running sales teams at software companies. you doing that for, a while now. I did a short stint as an entrepreneur, actually myself.

Right before I joined Hatch, I'd actually started a company, and was working on building tools for sales teams, actually at that company, we ended up, selling the business and I was looking for my next adventure and I got introduced to the founders of Hatch and was really excited about what they were working on, what they were building.

So decided to jump in a full time there. So I do have some experience starting a business, being an entrepreneur. and then I have, here day to day responsible for, building our sales team, and working with great customers like you.

John Wilson: I don't know how to build a software sales team. Sure.

It's a confession. I'm glad I got that off my chest pretty early on. Could you like walk me through what that even looks like? Cause I really feel like there's probably a lot of similar it's, we've got a B2B sales component. How does this work?

Tim Geisenheimer:  No, I think, and, as we were talking about a minute ago, I think we're going to dive into it, I feel like there's a ton of similarities between software and home services actually.

And so it's an under discussed topic, but I'm happy to discuss it. effectively what we do on the sales side is we try and identify companies that we think are a good fit for our product that have a problem that we can help solve. It's as simple as that. And I would imagine, I'd love to hear your perspective, but there's similarities in home services too, right?

People have a problem that you can solve and you can solve really well. there's maybe some competition, some other people that could help solve that. You're trying to make sure you're getting in front of them, before maybe some other folks do. And you're hopefully doing a great job solving their problem.

So if they ever have that problem again, you're able to come back, they're going to come back to you and think of you first. And same idea for us as far as building the sales team. with trying to look for people who are able to, understand and have empathy for our customers, to have conversations about those problems that they're having and then be, good communicators and, be able to explain how we can help solve.

John Wilson: If you, in a few areas for me, for like how it ties into our industry, I was just. talking with Kelly Roberts and she's an awesome entrepreneur down in, Dallas Fort Worth. And she's the CEO of, Moss heating and cooling. She they've actually been able to scale like crazy fast.

it's 15 of years and all organic, which is not a big new construction component. But, we were talking about Hey, how do you think about building out the sales function for what you're doing? And I really do feel like it's very similar. to, to what you guys are doing, where it's okay, we build this outreach campaign, we bring on SDRs or BDRs or something to go contact, our ideal client.

And we're trying to do the same thing, like tying it to us. We have a restoration business. which is almost all B2B. So the way that works is we're going to go sometimes knock on doors, with other plumbing companies. We're going to talk to insurance, companies and we have to identify them. And it's just such a different process than me going and buying a lead off Google.

Tim Geisenheimer: No, exactly right. And I would say the similarities there just to maybe draw more tactical details for software. So one of the things that we do is that we rely heavily on data to try and understand, who are the right folks. To buy our product. Why do we think they're the right people? What data sources can we gather to try and pinpoint, Hey, Wilson companies is at this level of revenue and they have this many CSRs and they have, they're maybe spending this much on marketing across these different channels.

We're able to gather some of that data to help us, much more finally target and pinpoint the people that we think are the best fit, for hatch. And then. That message from our SDR from our, sales team is going to be much more likely to receive positively than if we're going after the wrong people.

So I'd imagine in that, business that you're starting to build, same idea, right? If you're able to find people that you think are, a really good fit for that restoration business, then if you put someone to, go, reach out to them, it's going to be better fit than, if it's just a random list of people that you Got from somewhere. so that'd be maybe a recommendation to you. It'd be, what's the, what are some of the data points you can find? that would indicate someone's, really going to need your service, and then try to identify that data and then go find it.

John Wilson: Yeah. Like how does that work for you guys?

Like who's a good example, of who you would look for?

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah. So I gave you some examples and I'll go down to a few more. So we look at things like what's the size of the business and that can be a revenue estimate or total employees. I think service Titan, for example, looks at. how many trucks do you have?

vans, right? And so famously they're at their conference pantheon. They'll hand out those pins where they'll say, you got 80 trucks or whatever it is. So that's one of the ways they look at it. But same idea for us. are you doing 30 million in revenue? That's going to be a better fit for us than someone doing three or four.

and then we look at things like, do you have a contact center team? are you doing some of the things like, or inside sales team, are you doing that rehash component? if you do, those are check boxes for us. and then, finally, there's the component of, are you a multi location business?

do you have a larger operation where you're starting to expand easily or even, in rare cases nationally? That would be a really, telltale sign for us. And there's, more than just that, but those are some of the good signs for us that, Hey, this business is probably going to be a better fit, for hatch versus a businesses might be a bit smaller.

John Wilson: Yeah. When you're going to hire, I'm, trying to like. Take in so I can go build a B2B sales team. Yeah, please. If I'm going to go build a B2B sales team tomorrow in my restoration business or grease traps would be another thing that we do that, that might apply here. who am I looking for? And like, how do you even set the measurements?

Like how many calls a day or appointments a day or like, how do you set that?

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah. So I think there's two roles that are typically in software sales and you mentioned, SDR, BDR, and be curious to hear how you're thinking about it for what you're planning to do. Sure. Bye. The two primary roles that can get more specialized, but let's just for sake of simplicity, it's that sales development rep, which is the most junior person.

And they're responsible for the cold calling, the cold email, and that sort of thing. typically the way they're paid is they'll have some level of, a base salary, but then they'll have a big component, which is based on. A few different metrics, different companies do it different ways. But one of the key ones would be just how many demos have you set?

So have you, you're going for the grease trap business. How many like grease trap demos have you set, this month that we do monthly, you can do different timelines, but that's typically how you do it. And then you pay per demo. some companies will do it where they'll look a little bit lower down and.

you might call it a pipeline. So the, or the funnel. So it's not just about the demo set, because maybe you could set a lot of bad demos, so let's actually pay on what we call a qualified opportunity. So someone you've actually had a phone call, you did the demo set, you talked to the person, you're like, yeah, we need the grease trap actually.

we, we don't have that and that's something we need. and then that would be qualified. And so then instead you could actually pay on the qualified opportunities. That's how we do it here. So we have, I've seen companies do demo set and we do it actually on the opportunity side.

So we really want that team to, they can set a hundred demos, but if it's only one qualified opportunity, that's no good, right? They're not going to be doing their job. We want them focused on. on finding kind of great people for us to work with that have the problem that we help solve and that we can uniquely solve.

and so I'd recommend that for you, that, junior role, maybe the kind of outbound role would be focused on that. If you want to keep things simple, you can have that role also go into the field and do the meetings and actually sell the product. Yeah, and do the sale.

John Wilson: Yeah.

Tim Geisenheimer: What we do is we do have it separated.

So we have that role that's setting the meetings and helping to get those qualified opportunities. And then we have. The more senior sales team, they're doing kind of the demos. They're talking about the problems, their understanding through discovery, what, exists today, what are you doing about sales follow up or whatever it might be.

And then, they're compensated on just. commission on the revenue they produce. So it's often a direct percentage, you get a piece of, every sale that you bring in. And so I think that's pretty common for, home services too, right? Oftentimes you'll see the rehash team and they're getting paid, even sometimes on strict commission basis, but.

Fairly common there. So those are the two roles in software. I think there's a lot of kind of overlap into your world too. But yeah,

John Wilson: like ours is, so we have, we're different, in that we have this outside sales team, but for homeowners and the way that looks is, like door to door, canvassers and, An events team and ours is set up really pretty similar to this, which is funny.

I think lead setters is what we call them because it's, we're going to go or canvassers, but we're going to go knock on the door. We're going to try to set an appointment. and then they get paid yet per appointment. Now there are some companies, sorry, and the appointment is run by a salesperson.

We're finding, and I'm sure you guys are, too, but it is complicated to set a good lead from like scratch, like really complicated. Like we have, we're maybe 10 months into this and we're just starting to like. set good leads. we're setting hundreds of leads a month, but are they good leads?

did we set them up? Did we set good expectations? what ha what communication happened between setting that lead and like sitting for, we call it the demo to sitting for the demo. And did we talk about what we were going to do? It's been really interesting. And then cancel rate, I talked about that on Twitter the other day, I did a post and it was like, Hey, we're eight months into this.

If we're finally getting ROI on our, on our events team and cancel rate has been like the nut to crack.

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah. And by the way, these, things can happen in, in our business too. And I would say, I actually, I should have given you a call, John. I was in Cleveland, last week, so I'm sorry I missed you.

I know. It was in and out, but, I met with a home improvement company there.

John Wilson: I follow them along on LinkedIn. They're amazing.

Tim Geisenheimer: So I met with Vince at premiere and he walked me through some of his metrics. They have an extremely sophisticated, way of tracking their metrics throughout the entire kind of funnel.

And I saw them last week. So it's top of mind for me. But what I would say is They're constantly looking for how can we get gains within this pipeline, within this funnel, across all the different spots where there might be leakage or drop off. And so the canceled deployments is one that they, see to, everyone does, it's not, unique to them.

and so I think this is part of the process and a good, maybe to, to pat my own back, a good sales leader, this is what they're thinking about. They're thinking about how do You tweak this every aspect of the process to make it as streamlined as possible to make, to train the team, to do a better job, to understand where, what objections are coming up commonly to iron those out, to make those kind of less, less friction there.

That's what a great sales leader will do and how you can get that team to start to be more productive when you're thinking about, like that example sounds great. Want to talk to them even more now.

John Wilson: To me, it blends the line between sales and marketing. And I think this whole outside sales thing does.

So like you're seeing this, like the cancel rate to all that stuff that is a sales function in premier in this case, which if the listener doesn't know, premier is like a, Like insanely fast growing home remodel business. I don't even, I think they started like a year or two ago and they're clipping like 3 million weeks right now.

Tim Geisenheimer: They, I think this is, they put it on LinkedIn. So I don't think I'm sharing anything that's not public. yeah. That was a few years ago and they just had a, yeah, this is on LinkedIn. So I'll share what was on LinkedIn. 10 million, over 10 million a month.

John Wilson: Insane, just insane level of growth. It's, just totally unbelievable.

And they're based here in Akron, Ohio. That's right. Yeah. That's crazy. so you see that capturing leakage, handling the canceled, like that falls inside sales in your mind and in your mind.

Tim Geisenheimer: It's a collaboration. So certainly like on the marketing side, if you're, again, let's talk about the, something like the premier or home services use case.

You have all these different lead channels, right? And you're trying to optimize between Google LSA and Angie and modernize and all these different ones. And then you're looking at on a channel basis, what's the quality across different metrics? Where's drop off? So that's a marketing, focus, right?

Like you're trying to understand, the, cost per lead and like negotiating there. And, so there's a lot going on there that marketing owns, but then once it gets into, let's say the contact center and that can be, there's a difference between the service side and the sales side, but let's just say it's the sales side.

then you want to have that leader of the contact center or on the sales side, understand, okay, when we get leads coming in or different, from different channels, how are we optimizing our approach and our process to maximize things like the set rate demo? Yeah. Low, minimize cancel, what are the things we can do?

What software can we use to make sure we're, optimizing that. so that's where I think sales really comes into play. and it's a collaboration between sales and marketing.

John Wilson: I feel like that gave me, they gave me a lot of good ideas. I'm kicking, you're in Akron. I'm now, I'm really kicking myself now.

I hope you feel so bad. I, I like live in Akron. I live five minutes from their office and our old office is probably two minutes from where they used to be. We moved to Stout. We were in their office and everything. Oh man. Yeah. I got to reach out to them on LinkedIn. I really got to connect.

Maybe I'll start with Hey, come on the show. There's nothing white dudes love more than getting on a podcast. It's like the easiest in the world. Vince is, he's super sharp. I'll connect you guys over email.

It's been a huge area of learning for us. and I think the whole, maybe, not the whole industry, we got to a decent size, really just spending a ton of money on Google LSA and not loving the lead. And it was almost like there was so many leads that it just.

didn't matter that you lost some here that you just didn't think about it. but we've really put a ton of work into what's that speed delayed process look like? What's our, how do we reduce our cancel rate? How do we increase that, that sit rate? And, and that's been across all of it. we.

We started really getting the most lessons learned out of our field marketing team, because that's where it was the most egregious. But then when we looked at what was happening in that team, we're like, Oh my God, this is happening in the entire rest of the business. Like, how are we continuing to rehash these leads?

And what's our process there? And the answer was, there was none. and I think like plumbing HVAC electric as a whole. You're just not used to it. Like you're used to like, Hey, I don't have hot water. we call it like, it's like the cold lease first hot lead problem where like you can get to 20 million exclusively on hot leads, but eventually you do have to figure out how to manage leads.

Tim Geisenheimer: I would say as a small plug to what we do, that's an area where we really help. And I think the reason why, you know, as you get to be a larger business, why there's an attraction to using a service like ours is. Because all of a sudden you see that maybe organic growth piece, but, you're starting to tap out to some extent across the major markets you're in.

So it's either you tell me if I'm wrong on this, cause you're the expert, but it's either you expand markets and grow that way, or you start to say, Hey, how are we going to do better job making the. The market we're in, more efficient for us and not lose the leads, and not just rely on those hot leads, but also say, Hey, this, someone was looking for something here and we didn't do anything with that.

And so maybe we can do a better job following up.

John Wilson: Yeah. 100%. And I think it's just totally different. Like even the work that we've done, like inside our call center on like how we think about rehash, cause it starts off with okay, how are you communicating? and I'm, the hatch was our solution to that, but then okay, are you calling to, and like, how are you managing a pipeline of these, leads and it's, yeah, huge learning, for us, cause it's just so different.

And what we were doing in Oh, your toilet's broken. We'll be there, in two hours. It's just a totally different experience.

Tim Geisenheimer: What, as far as LSA goes, I'm curious to hear, the distribution for you, was it predominantly the phone leads or were you also doing message leads? Where did you see the biggest bang for your buck as you scaled that up?

John Wilson: I have two answers to that. Like almost all phone leads. Like we did some message, but. People really just didn't use it. And also we didn't have a great like response tool. so maybe other people are doing that better. I just really think like we were really immature there. but what has been totally out of freaking left field for us.

That's why I keep talking about it on LinkedIn and Twitter. I probably should stop, but, like all these lead aggregators are now like an actually good lead source for us because we went through all this energy of building this, like rehash, like component, like outbound calling and outbound messaging and like the speeds lead process, like Angie.

Had a higher ROI than LSA in January for us. And we're like, what the hell just happened? what just happened? totally crazy. So all that to say, yes, it was phone leads, but now that we've gone through this discipline, we're like, oh my gosh, like every lead we have is now a lot more valuable.

like we just got a couple hundred leads from this home show. We did that premiere was into, and we have this sort of machine to, to put it into now. So we're pumped. You were about eight months into using Avoca and Avoca has been an awesome partner for us in our call center. So what Avoca does for us is they do two different things.

One. They have their coach product and coach has been helping us do what it says. Coach our CSRs every single day. It listens to every call and uses AI technology to basically pick apart that call and tell us where we can improve. And for the last eight months, we've been consistently improving our scores, which has been awesome.

The other product they have is just conventional booking. And it's an AI tool that books over the phone customer calls in and it either handles overflow as in our phones are full or it does nights and weekends for us and a customer will call in and actually deal with an AI. Agent all the way through booking and the savings inside call center has allowed us to ramp up our marketing to continue to grow Even more.

Thank you Avoca and thank you Tyson for your partnership.

Tim Geisenheimer: One of the reasons why we work closely and I think they like us with folks like angie and others is that yeah we have an opportunity As a software solution to help you do a better job going after the folks that come in and raise their hand by that platform and others.

And, oftentimes I think, folks that, that own and operate home services businesses will say, Oh, Angie, this doesn't really work for us. And I think part of that is just the way they're parceling it out to different people. And that's annoying. But at the same time, if you're able to get to it quickly, that's a high intent.

high intent lead. And then if you go back to it, I was looking for something. The first person I spoke to wasn't able to do what I was looking for, maybe at a price I wanted. So I'm more, you caught me two days later, but I'm now still in the market for it. I'm willing to talk to you. So thanks for reaching back out.

So it makes a ton of sense. And, that is fascinating that it was higher ROI than, Oh, crazy. Yeah.

John Wilson: Totally just cause LSA sets the gold standard for us anyways, I'm sure other people feel different, but it sets the gold standard for us of okay, this is our best ROI. And it has been for a long time.

So yeah, the fact, and Angie does have this reputation of just being shitty.

Tim Geisenheimer: I think that, we're getting, we're, good partners with them. I think that reputation is often as a result, results from a built their business, operates is. It's competitive. And so you have to, as, the customer of Angie, you have to.

play by the rules a little bit and it's not easy always to do that. But if you do, I think it can really work. And we've certainly seen a lot of larger energy customers. They're using us, be really successful with it. but I can understand the frustration, just understanding how they, how that product operates.

John Wilson: Yeah. And I think it's mainly just like immature process. The smaller you are, you don't have the speed to lead. You don't have this ability to do all the rehash you need to do. but man, they, they. have been pumping out leads. Like it has really been just super successful for us. So we're excited about it.

That's great to hear. What are you seeing right now? Like, how's the industry feeling? what are you seeing across everybody? How are people winning?

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah, I think the overall from what I've seen and I know there's a weather aspect to it. winter has, I think, been good for the industry overall.

I don't know if that's what you're saying.

John Wilson: there's been some weird weather. Us having a winter is nice. Like last February, it was 70 degrees for a good portion of February. So we're just excited it's in the twenties.

Tim Geisenheimer: So it's cold, there's snow, there's stuff going on. So I think that just as a backdrop is good.

And I think, what we're, seeing is that there's a desire for, companies to continue to invest in process and invest, and we're often talking to the larger. but there's tremendous excitement around technology and how it can help the business. and we have a product launch at Kristen, our head of marketing might kill me for saying this, in an unsanctioned, we won't tell her thank you here, but we have a really exciting product launch coming up, that's going to be, I think, a pretty big game changer for the industry.

Yeah, you should tell me more about it. Yeah, so she's not  here.

Tim Geisenheimer: I think just in general, the continuation of, being able to leverage technology to improve operations is something that we see. a ton and there's, just excitement I think in the industry about the trend continuing to go up.

I haven't heard much, concern. I think people are pretty just bullish in general about, the business and how things are going.

John Wilson: I think what's been interesting and I wonder if it's market or I guess I don't know what it is. So maybe you tell me what it is. cause you're a little bit like deeper in some of these businesses than I am.

but what I've been fascinated by Is some of these businesses that are like technology driven, I think strong leadership teams in the right markets doing the right, all resi service, that type of thing. And they have just stalled out or shrunk a little bit. have you gotten any exposure to businesses like that?

And we, where do you think they could be improving?

Tim Geisenheimer: I would say, And I don't know, why this is the case, but we don't have, too many examples of that in our, customer base. but I have heard, maybe that's self serving. There's also, we see this in, I come from the software space. Sometimes in software, there's startups that, they'll maybe raise too much capital and they'll expand too quickly in terms of their operations.

And then as a result, they'll fly, too close to the sun, and they'll get, they'll get, get burned. And so I do wonder if sometimes that, that can happen. in other industries as well, where, you, expand a bit too quickly, you don't have a proven processor, ability to win in that market, or the right people in places to succeed there.

And as a result, that, that might lead you to then pull back. so it's probably something like that would be my guess. you tell me, cause it's again, your space, but. My understanding is that it's really hard to win in some of these competitive markets, the tier one, two, and even three markets.

there are great operators out there, independent operators, such as yourselves or private equity backed platforms. So to, to win, you gotta have your game face on. is that fair to say?

John Wilson: You got to show up to fight a hundred percent. Yeah. And I think, yeah, I suspect you're right.

maybe it is like a overinvestment or, something that, that, Brandon and I, my, my president, we talk about a lot is what we call the stall. So it, there seems to be this moment and maybe it's over expansion, it's us looking into other people's businesses and just trying to figure out what happened, why the stall, and what's been interesting is over the past couple months, I just see it more and more.

So I'm like, okay, you've got to. You've got a ton of these customers like you're dealing with them. Are you seeing it too? But I can think of 10 examples off the top of my head of these companies that got to 10 to 30 million and then they just stopped.

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah. It's interesting. And, again, I don't, I would, I promise I would tell you if, and I wouldn't name the names, but we haven't seen, we haven't at least heard examples of those types of companies in terms of larger ones.

And those revenue ranges you mentioned in our customer base. Yeah. That doesn't mean there aren't some there. it's possible there are, I just haven't heard of them,

John Wilson: But I really do think that's, that might be a part of the answer then because Hey, if they're just not choosing to invest in, in other stuff, like maybe that's it, maybe they're on antiquated CRMs or maybe they aren't loving the lead.

Cause I know leads are like, yeah, that's everybody's problem right now.

Tim Geisenheimer: Sure. Yeah. and I would say, putting what we do aside, I think just overall having really buttoned up process, being detail oriented, having the right people in place and the right teams and the team structure in place. I don't care if you're a software business or in home services, those will never go out of style.

And so if you do have a situation where. you burned a lot of money to scale up on marketing on buying leaves or whatever it is, but you didn't then put in a lot of processes that you need to put in. It's possible that could then lead to that stall and growth and, or, bad things happening.

But if you are putting in, solid processes and. You're a customer focused and you have a great brand and you're doing kind of all the things that, I believe, Wilson companies are doing, then I think you should be able to weather any storms as far as the lead equation goes.

Yeah, I think we've heard, weather aside, some similar kind of stories on that front. and, we, are probably gonna be putting out some data just in aggregate around what we see. 'cause we have, 1200 customers and yeah, we send millions and millions of messages every month.

Tens of millions of messages every month. And so we get, we're connected to all these different. lead aggregators as well. So I think we probably have a story we can tell there. so let me report back on that because it'd be interesting to see if we have any macro data we're able to share.

John Wilson: I'm really interested. What do you think? and this is like a, in between us, right? tied in between what you guys do in your sales team and what you think a home service company should do, but walk me through the pipeline management, obviously hatches a component. But there's other components to the call, the everything else.

And what do you think best in class looks like?

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah. I think you mentioned service Titan. So I think having, a great CRM like service Titan really is important to managing that. And in our case, we use a product called HubSpot, which is, some home services companies as well, but it's, very common in, in software.

And so we have. all of our customer data in there. We track everything from the first time someone, registers for this podcast, on the website all the way through to when they become a customer. And sometimes that customer journey. It can take, three or four or five months, and it can take, multiple different conversations from different people.

and so we do our best to really pin down where people are coming from. What are the steps, in between we have what we call opportunity stages that we track. and we're pretty meticulous on understanding and inspecting. where those conversations are, what the next steps are.

And again, we're more B2B like we were talking about earlier. So that, that matters more for us. I think it sounds like premier runs a pretty similar process.

John Wilson: Correct. They absolutely do. Yeah. I think to me, it's all the same thing. Like we're all, it's all the same thing. This is here's the lead. How do we convert that lead?

Tim Geisenheimer: What's funny and, I won't share the exact numbers, but their average ticket size is quite similar to ours. if you just forget that it's software and it's bathroom remodel in the case of premier, and software for us, it's the same amount of money.

It's, a big considered purchase and, we're obviously working with companies, but. Companies have to be thoughtful about how they spend money, just like consumers. very similar. And they're, they inspect all aspects of the pipeline, like you said, as well.

John Wilson: Yeah, I feel it's honestly, I'm excited about it because I feel like we've started to scratch the service.

And the more that we like learn about how to do this, the more we're just like, oh, we know nothing. But that's so exciting because we can just continue to get better. And this is a discipline that our industry just doesn't really care about. are in premiere. Absolutely. But plumbing, HVAC and electric is still so driven by this, the hot lead,

What about for the installation side? I guess that would still be driven by, Hey, I have a problem that happens to be related to, my HVAC system. And then you go deal with that hot lead. And then the answer is, Hey, you actually need to replace your condenser. And it's going to be 10 grand to do it.

Maybe I've got a lead over here and this lead is a no air conditioning call. And if I go to this lead, I am very likely to sell something like 80 percent closing rate. And if I flip it over to a comfort advisor, I'm going to flip it's going to work.

it doesn't take a lot of work. So HVAC and plumbing and electric people need it. Like they need heat, they need water, they need power. So when you get those leads, you basically get drunk off them. So when you, so then the whole industry, like it's, Angie's list and all that stuff, not really working.

It obviously does work, but that's, it's it's the industry joke because that is so much harder. To close, you have to build a rehash process. You have to build all these new heads inside your call center or contact center. And you're like, despite all of the work you're closing right over here with this hot lead is like 60 to 80 percent and you're closing right over here is like 35 if you're green.

So I, whereas There's no such thing as a hot bathroom model. That's right. That's right. So like, all they know how to do is go close cold leaves, or solar, or roofing.

Tim Geisenheimer: We go in and people don't, they're like, oh wait, do I really need this product? What are you doing? It's very much education and why do you have a problem?

Did you even know you had the problem? Like we can help solve that. I guess I do. I should be doing rehash. I should be doing these things.

John Wilson: So you've got this whole industry drunk on easy money. okay, I'm going to go Hey, they need a hot water tank because their hot water tank literally blew up in their basement this morning.

It's not like there's a, let's have a three to six month buying decision and budget for it. It's an emergency. Yeah. So it's, easy. I'm going to go close that. But then, okay, I got a lead off Angie's list. they're discerning, they're trying to figure it out. Who's the right provider?

What's the right price? What are the things I want? And it's not emergent. or same thing with a home show. Whereas again, bathroom models, bigger models, like long sales cycle, you're used to a 20 to 30 percent closing rate. You're built around that. But plumbing in HVAC just isn't.

Tim Geisenheimer: I imagine there's some aspect of, let's say the installation piece where you could do, more of the B2B sales process, right?

Because, there, I'll maybe use myself as an example. We had a, I live in, in, in Brooklyn, in New York City. So we had an in window AC unit, which is antiquated, loud, terrible. And we went through a valuation of putting a mini split in it. Not cheap, by the way, as you will. And, and so it was a considered purchase and we did our research and we're figuring it all right.

but it's a different model than, Hey, we, our existing system broke and it's a hundred degrees outside and we need to fix it ASAP. so come in here. it was a longer process.

John Wilson: Totally. Yeah. So the whole industry, yeah, a little bit more on the install side, get comfort advisors in HVAC.

They don't even want to run the Angie's list leads. All they want are the tech flips. It's a really big, like cultural problem in these companies because they're like, this is a waste of time. I only close one in three over here. Whereas like for a master model company, that's probably like great. but over here I close to 50 percent or 60%.

Tim Geisenheimer: And so that's what we see. And I'm sure you're aware and see it too, but we see a lot of teams with a rehash team. Like they have a specific sales team. It's this is what they do and they're compensated on this. They're not getting the good, not getting the good stuff, the hot leads there.

They're focused on, rehash. And we've seen a ton of companies that work with us. Building successful business is doing that. but it's different. It's a different muscle that they're working for sure.

John Wilson: Man. This was, this was awesome. I feel like we covered a lot. we got to touch industry.

We got to touch background. We plugged hatch a couple of times, which is great. Hatch really is a great partner and we are really excited about them. We got to guilt trip you for at least three or four minutes about how you literally came to Akron and didn't say hi.

Tim Geisenheimer: We're, hanging. I'm coming.

John Wilson: Yeah, it's fine.

No, it's totally fine. I'm going to remember this. this was awesome. If people want to get ahold of you, how can they find you?

Tim Geisenheimer: Yeah. So I'm on LinkedIn. You can search by name, which is obviously, as we discussed at the beginning, a longer last name, Tim Geisenheimer, which will be hopefully in the podcast name.

So you just copy paste that over. or you can shoot me an email. it is Tim Geisenheimer, Tim dot Geisenheimer at

John Wilson: usehatch.ai. This was awesome, Tim. Thanks for coming on today. and I look forward to seeing you when you eventually come back to Akron.

Tim Geisenheimer: Thanks, John. It's now going to be scheduled, don't you worry.

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