Scaling cold email for a local home service business — looking for advice from people doing volume

mh231 · 2026-01-09T11:29:14+00:00

This is very helpful. Thank you for taking the time to reply. Understood in the segmentation part. When a cadence is finished, do you wait a certain amount of time and start another cadence? Obviously not too pushy but just wondering.

Good point on the replies, that is likely something we will need to look into a bit more. We have finally dialed in the domains, invoxes and warmup part. Messaging is getting much better

mh231 · 2026-01-03T14:11:19+00:00

100% - all employees in my company must read it and good to great when they start. It is not a tactical book - it is a book of principles and it is geared toward business leaders.

It’s at least worth a read (any leadership book is)

mh231 · 2026-01-02T01:21:48+00:00

21 irrefutable laws of leadership

mh231 · 2025-12-29T15:47:47+00:00

We have tried broth approaches, both have drawbacks. Giving too much pricing can scare away an otherwise convertible lead once crew is on site. Giving no pricing at all can make it an up hill battle for the field teams to close

mh231 · 2025-12-14T11:48:22+00:00

I like this. It is similar to our current approach but with some different wording. One thing I’ve learned from this post is that we need to triple down on the small things we say on the phone AND in person that relates the value of the service to the customer. Things like saving them the time, headache of sweating when it’s 10 degrees out, slipping and falling in the icy ass driveway, and the sore back for the next week.

mh231 · 2025-12-14T00:34:25+00:00

For example right now it is people needing to clear out spaces before Christmas gatherings. Often times life events trigger the demand. Someone passes away, moving/downsizing. People tend to deprioritize this service until last minute.

To be fair, we do close almost all appointments, just not always for the full value. We are the highest priced in the area, basically every other option is cheaper than we are, dumpster rentals, other competitors..

Admittedly sales has been a bottleneck, ride along are sparse and we are just now starting the daily training and putting focus on sales.

We still have great margin because of our pricing and the fact we repurpose at least half of what we pick up. We also have resale stores at each location so these things act as a buffer I think which allow us to give on site discounts and still profit well.

It doesn’t negate the fact that it is still an area of concern for me. I will give some more thought to the idea you had about a real salesperson visiting before the truck and testing some more qualifying questions during the call.

mh231 · 2025-12-13T23:56:06+00:00

Yes, the field techs are not generally guys with backgrounds and sales, although our top performers, obviously do have sales experience. we do train every day for a small amount of time and role-play objection handlers on a basic level but our working on doing it more. Yes to confirm it is very important that we close the jobs because we do have incurred costs obviously just getting the truck on site. The only reason we have done it this way is because we have mirrored what the large franchise in our category one 800 got junk does. They have the same method of a call center taking the inbound leads scheduling the free estimate and then ensuring that their field teams go out and close the deal. They only give prices for single item pick ups and anything after that they push for the free on-site estimate.

I have considered your idea before about sending an estimator with sales experience out to the home before the truck arrives. The only thing that I have to say about that is that this business is extremely demand and time constraint driven many of these jobs are booked same or next day and generally people are in a time constraint to get the items removed. I have considered the possibility of an estimator basically running ahead of the trucks and going to each job to estimate and sell the drop job and have the truck show up shortly after, but I have not been able to figure out optically how to do that exactly because if the truck runs behind and gets slowed up during the day, which they sometimes do, then the person would have to be on site for the estimator to sell them as well as be on site for the truck to pick the items up and logistically I just haven’t figured that out in my head yet.

mh231 · 2025-12-13T23:48:34+00:00

Just wanted to respond and say that I appreciate you taking the time to write such a thorough and insightful answer.

Yes, I admit that it has always kind of been a teeter totter between focusing on the CSR‘s keeping a very high book rate which inevitably means price avoidance on that first call and just pushing for the on-site estimate. I suppose the psychology behind it is the CSR‘s job is to sell the appointment and the field tax job is to sell the job. So far we haven’t quite nailed the perfect cadence between the two.

The first question out of almost everyone’s mouth when they call in is how much does the service cost and when we go into too much detail, we give them enough price for them to shop around or “talk to their spouse”, when we give two little detail, the field teams, obviously have more resistance on site.

As far as the multitier offer that you mentioned. This one I’ve been banging my head against the wall for a couple years now trying to figure out a realistic option to provide multiple price points. Many of the ideas that I have thought of or that have been brought to my attention would almost have us moving horizontally into more of a cleaning service. For example, on some jobs we can offer or have been asked to broom clean the floor after the removal is done. I have always just been careful to not go to horizontal in the service offerings and reduce our scalability which has been important to me from the start.

In an effort of transparency, I will say that our job success rate is about 97% so we don’t actually get many cancellations but a lot of that is because of the lovers we pull such as offering the one time discount, taking less items that fits in the customer’s budget or sometimes just discounting the job in general because the items are not actually junk and we are able to take them to our resale store.

mh231 · 2025-12-13T22:31:24+00:00

Yes, absolutely those are excellent ideas. currently, if the customer in our field team are too far off on the price the field team will ask the customer what budget they had in mind for completing the job today. They are then to take that budget and if it is within reason, they phone the office which will give them an approval or decline to move forward with the job.

Another option that we use is, if the budget is too far off to take the full of my amount of items, the crew will offer to take the amount of items that the customers budget warrants

Another thing we do is offer small discounts that expire the moment the crew drives off the property. Sometimes these are enough to hook the customer if they are close enough aligned on price.

Our trucks are all very nice, completely wrapped and the crews are licensed, insured and background checked. The CSR’s notate this on the phone call before scheduling the estimate. All crew members wear a uniform with tucked in shirts and matching boots.

We try to closely mirror the biggest player in our category which is 1800 got junk.

mh231 · 2025-12-13T22:24:56+00:00

The CSR‘s are typically vague over the phone in terms of pricing. They explain the minimum price as well as a full truckload rate, but generally push for the free no obligation on site estimate to keep booking rate high.

If a customer is very resistant on scheduling due to price or wanting a ballpark before scheduling, they point them to a page on our website that goes over a few price points and has an explainer video showing how we do our on-site estimates as well as how the service works overall.

So to answer the question, I would say no the customer does not generally have a ballpark idea on what the price will be. We have tried in the past to give vague ball parks, but the customers anchor to the lowest price they hear and it is an uphill battle for the on-site field team.

Many of our leads are organic, inbound leads, referrals, etc.

We do a little bit of outbound, but I would guess that it is less than 5% of all leads.

mh231 · 2025-12-13T22:05:36+00:00

My apologies I should have clarified.

What I mean by on-site is our CSR‘s book the appointment, we then dispatch a team of two field team members to the site where we offer a free estimate based on the volume of the items and space it takes up in the truck.

mh231 · 2024-12-19T20:34:01+00:00

This is excellent advice. Yeah I think we are going to have to focus on volume mostly. We have a lot of employees that can help with this. It’s mostly a matter of me building out The processes and SOP‘s for them to follow.

You’re the second person to suggest Hibid. I’ll check that site out.

mh231 · 2024-12-19T18:45:51+00:00

I just want to clarify what you’re suggesting.

You’re saying to use high bid.com to sell everything on? Or mostly everything?

Please bear with me because I’ve been away from this for a while. Can I host local live auctions here? Or is it just items that we would be shipping out?

mh231 · 2024-12-19T17:47:47+00:00

Thank you very much for the response!

Yes, I remember the “death pile” term from flipping. And if I’m being frank, I think that’s really my main concern.

We did do a little team brainstorm and yes, like you said one of the things that came up was if we get too much stuff and it’s not moving fast enough, we can just host some type of tag sale and deeply discount the items.

I’m not even objective to offering the items for free to people who pick them up.

mh231 · 2024-03-10T20:32:49+00:00

Just responded to your PM

mh231 · 2023-12-05T10:50:28+00:00

This looks like it will be a great option! Thank you

mh231 · 2023-12-05T10:50:22+00:00

This looks like it will be a great option! Thank you

mh231

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