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Marisol from Benavides Tile and Stone in Round Rock, TX is losing warm leads across voicemail, Instagram DMs, Thumbtack, and website forms. Eric diagnoses the real issue — no single pane of glass — and walks through missed-call auto-text, a lead pipeline, and nudges.
Marisol runs Benavides Tile and Stone in Round Rock, just north of Austin — six people, eleven years in business. Leads are coming in from four disconnected inboxes and going cold before she can call back. Eric walks through how to fix it without boiling the ocean.
In this episode:
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Eric: ...so wait, back up. You said a week. A WEEK before you noticed?
Marisol Benavides: Yeah. Sometimes longer, honestly.
Eric: Oof.
Marisol Benavides: And it's not like I'm lazy, Eric. I'm up at five. I'm on job sites by seven.
Eric: Right.
Marisol Benavides: But by the time I'm back in the truck checking messages, there's a voicemail, two Instagram DMs, a Thumbtack ping, and somebody filled out the form on my website.
Eric: Four different inboxes.
Marisol Benavides: Four different inboxes. And they don't talk to each other.
Eric: So tell folks what you actually do, before we dig in.
Marisol Benavides: Sure. I own Benavides Tile and Stone. We're based in Round Rock, just north of Austin. Six people counting me. We do flooring, backsplashes, shower surrounds, a little bit of fireplace work when it's pretty.
Eric: Eleven years, right?
Marisol Benavides: Eleven years this spring. I left a bigger remodeling outfit because I wanted to actually, you know, LOOK at the tile before it went on the wall.
Eric: Fair.
Marisol Benavides: And the work side of it, that part I love. The paperwork side has always been the thing that eats me alive.
Eric: And the lead follow-up specifically.
Marisol Benavides: Lead follow-up specifically. Because I'll be honest, by the time a homeowner is reaching out to me, they've already texted three other contractors.
Eric: Yep.
Marisol Benavides: So if I call back on day six, I'm not the hero. I'm the guy who finally remembered.
Eric: And that's margin. That's real money walking.
Marisol Benavides: It's warm leads going cold. And then I feel bad, so I offer a discount, so now I'm doing the job for less AND I waited a week.
Eric: Worst of both worlds.
Marisol Benavides: Worst of both worlds.
Eric: Okay so let me diagnose what I'm actually hearing. Because I don't think your problem is you.
Marisol Benavides: Go on.
Eric: I don't think it's work ethic, I don't think it's intention. You just described four different channels, no central view, and a person whose actual job is physical.
Marisol Benavides: Right.
Eric: You can't be on the tool and in a CRM at the same time. Nobody can.
Marisol Benavides: Thank you.
Eric: You're welcome. But seriously, the issue isn't that you're bad at follow-up. The issue is you don't have a single pane of glass.
Marisol Benavides: A what?
Eric: One place where every lead lands, no matter where it came from. Website form, DM, Thumbtack, missed call, voicemail. All of it, one list.
Marisol Benavides: That... would change my life.
Eric: And it exists. We've been using an all-in-one ops platform at my agency for I think three years now. We run everything through it.
Marisol Benavides: What's it called?
Eric: I'm gonna just keep calling it the platform we use, if that's okay. I'm not here to sell anybody anything.
Marisol Benavides: Fair enough.
Eric: But I'll walk you through what we actually did. Because we had a version of your problem.
Marisol Benavides: You did?
Eric: Smaller scale. Our stuff was coming in through a website chat, a Facebook page, and like, people emailing me directly because they had my card.
Marisol Benavides: The card people.
Eric: The card people are the worst, I love them, but they're the worst.
Marisol Benavides: So what did you do first?
Eric: First thing, and this is almost boring, we just hooked up every channel to the one inbox inside the platform.
Marisol Benavides: Every channel.
Eric: Every channel. The website form became a form that fed into it. The Facebook messages piped in. The Google Business messages piped in. Missed calls on our business line triggered a text back automatically.
Marisol Benavides: Wait. Say that part again.
Eric: A missed call triggers an automatic text.
Marisol Benavides: What does the text say?
Eric: Ours says something like, "Hey, this is Eric at the agency, sorry I missed you. What were you calling about? I'll get back to you within the hour."
Marisol Benavides: That's it?
Eric: That's it. No pitch. Just a human sentence.
Marisol Benavides: And people reply?
Eric: People reply so much more than you'd think. Because here's the thing, a lot of folks don't want to leave a voicemail anyway.
Marisol Benavides: Oh they HATE voicemail.
Eric: Nobody wants to leave a voicemail. So the text gives them an easier door.
Marisol Benavides: Okay I'm already... yeah. Keep going.
Eric: So that's step one, consolidate. Step two, we gave every lead a status.
Marisol Benavides: Like new, contacted, quoted?
Eric: Exactly like that. In the platform you build what's basically a little pipeline. New lead comes in, it sits in the "new" column. The second you reach out, you drag it to "contacted."
Marisol Benavides: And if I forget to drag it?
Eric: That's the beautiful part. You can set it up so that if a lead sits in "new" for more than, say, fifteen minutes during business hours, you get a nudge.
Marisol Benavides: A nudge.
Eric: A text to your phone that just says, "Hey, you have a new lead waiting."
Marisol Benavides: I need that. I need that yesterday.
Eric: And then if it sits in "contacted" for two days without moving, another nudge. If it's been quoted and they haven't responded in four days, another nudge.
Marisol Benavides: So the system is basically poking me so I don't have to remember.
Eric: You're not remembering anymore. You're reacting to one list.
Marisol Benavides: One list.
Eric: One list.
Marisol Benavides: Okay but here's where I get nervous. Marisol brain says, that's a lot of setup.
Eric: Yeah. Let's talk about that honestly.
Marisol Benavides: Because I've tried CRMs before. I had one where I spent a Saturday setting it up and never opened it again.
Eric: You and everybody else.
Eric: Here's the trick we used, and I'd suggest the same for you. Don't try to boil the ocean on day one.
Marisol Benavides: Meaning?
Eric: Meaning, pick the ONE channel that's leaking the most leads for you, and plug just that one in first.
Marisol Benavides: For me that's probably the website form. Or honestly, missed calls.
Eric: Which one causes you the most pain?
Marisol Benavides: Missed calls. Because at least the website form sends me an email.
Eric: Then start there. Just the missed call auto-text. Nothing else.
Marisol Benavides: Just that one piece.
Eric: Just that one piece. Get it working. Live with it for a week.
Marisol Benavides: Then add the next thing.
Eric: Then add the next thing.
Marisol Benavides: Okay that I can handle.
Eric: The other thing we did, and this is maybe my favorite, we built out a little template library.
Marisol Benavides: Templates for what?
Eric: For the messages you send over and over. The "thanks for reaching out, here's what we need to give you a quote" message. The "just checking in, did you get a chance to look at the estimate" message. The "we'd love to come measure, here are two times" message.
Marisol Benavides: Oh I write those from scratch every time.
Eric: Every single time. And they're basically the same every time.
Marisol Benavides: Yeah.
Eric: So you build five or six of them once, you save them as templates, and now responding to a lead is two taps.
Marisol Benavides: Two taps.
Eric: Two taps. And you can still edit them, you can still make them personal, you just don't start from a blank screen.
Marisol Benavides: That alone would save me, I don't know, an hour a day?
Eric: Probably more. And more importantly, it means the response goes out in two minutes instead of twelve hours.
Marisol Benavides: Which is really the whole game.
Eric: That IS the game. Speed to lead.
Marisol Benavides: Speed to lead.
Eric: There's a reason that phrase exists. The contractor who texts back first usually wins. Not the one with the best price, not the one with the prettiest Instagram.
Marisol Benavides: Great, so my Instagram grid is just my hobby now.
Eric: Your Instagram grid is beautiful. I looked.
Marisol Benavides: Thank you.
Eric: But yeah, speed beats pretty almost every time in your world.
Marisol Benavides: Okay so walk me through, like, what does the actual day look like once this is running?
Eric: Sure. So picture this. You wake up, you have your coffee, before you even get in the truck you open the app on your phone.
Marisol Benavides: One app.
Eric: One app. You see three new leads from overnight. One was a website form at eleven p.m., one was an Instagram DM at six a.m., one was a missed call at seven ten.
Marisol Benavides: And the missed call already got auto-texted.
Eric: Already got auto-texted. And in fact, that person already replied back, "Hi, I'm looking for a backsplash install, do you serve Pflugerville?"
Marisol Benavides: So I just answer.
Eric: You just answer. You tap your template, you tweak one line, you send. That lead moves to "contacted." Takes you forty seconds.
Marisol Benavides: Forty seconds versus the twenty minutes I usually spend trying to find the number and figure out which conversation I was in the middle of.
Eric: And multiply that by five leads a day.
Marisol Benavides: That's two hours.
Eric: That's two hours of your life back. And more importantly, every one of those homeowners got a response before they called the next guy.
Marisol Benavides: Yeah.
Eric: Then here's the other thing. At the end of the week, you can look at your little pipeline and go, okay, I had twelve new leads, I quoted eight, I closed three, two are still thinking, two ghosted.
Marisol Benavides: I've never had that number.
Eric: Most people haven't. And it's not because they're bad at business, it's because the data was living in four places.
Marisol Benavides: Right.
Eric: Once it's in one place, you can actually see your business.
Marisol Benavides: Can I ask one more thing?
Eric: Please.
Marisol Benavides: Where does Notion fit? Because I keep hearing people talk about Notion.
Eric: Great question. We use Notion, we love Notion, but Notion is our WORKSPACE. It's where our SOPs live, our project docs, our client-facing wikis.
Marisol Benavides: Not the lead stuff.
Eric: Not the lead stuff. For your sales pipeline, you want something that's actually plugged into the phone lines and the DMs. Notion isn't that.
Marisol Benavides: Got it.
Eric: Think of it as, the platform runs the front door. Notion is the filing cabinet in the back office.
Marisol Benavides: That's a clean distinction.
Eric: Took me a while to figure out, honestly.
Eric: Okay. So let's say somebody's listening to this and they're in your shoes. Different trade maybe, but same problem. Leads from everywhere, nothing centralized.
Marisol Benavides: Yeah.
Eric: What would YOU tell them to try this week?
Marisol Benavides: Oh, me? You're asking me?
Eric: You're the one who's living it.
Marisol Benavides: Okay. Just the missed call auto-text.
Eric: Yeah?
Marisol Benavides: Just that. Because that's the one that haunts me. The idea that somebody called, I didn't pick up, and now they're calling the next name on their list, and I'll never even know they existed.
Eric: That's it.
Marisol Benavides: If all I did this week was set up ONE automatic text that goes out on a missed call, I think my close rate goes up noticeably.
Eric: I think you're right. And that's the ONE thing to try this week, folks. If you take nothing else away.
Marisol Benavides: Pick your leakiest channel.
Eric: Plug just that one in.
Marisol Benavides: Don't try to do the whole thing.
Eric: Don't try to do the whole thing. You'll burn out on a Saturday and you'll never open it again.
Marisol Benavides: Been there.
Eric: We've all been there.
Marisol Benavides: Can I say one more thing?
Eric: Go for it.
Marisol Benavides: The reason I agreed to come on and talk about this... I spent eleven years thinking I was just bad at the office side.
Eric: Yeah.
Marisol Benavides: And it turns out I was just doing it with the wrong tools.
Eric: That's it. That's the whole thing right there.
Marisol Benavides: Different problem than I thought.
Eric: Different problem entirely. You're not disorganized, Marisol. You just had four inboxes and two hands.
Marisol Benavides: Two hands covered in thinset most of the time.
Eric: Exactly.
Marisol Benavides: Thank you, Eric. Honestly.
Eric: Thank YOU. This was a good one.
Marisol Benavides: Yeah?
Eric: Yeah. Because somebody out there is in a van right now listening to this and nodding.
Marisol Benavides: I hope so.
Eric: Hey, if that's you, do us a favor and hit subscribe. We do one of these every week with a different operator who figured out one small thing that gave them their life back.
Marisol Benavides: And tell your contractor friends.
Eric: And tell your contractor friends. Especially the ones with four inboxes.
Marisol Benavides: Especially those.
Eric: Alright. We'll see y'all next week.
Marisol Benavides: Bye everybody.
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