Industry Voices: SearchLight's Jonathan Torrey

Intro

Jonathan Torrey is the Director of Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at SearchLight. We sat down and talked about marketing in the HVAC industry, what SearchLight does, and how data is transforming the home service industries.

Below is a summary of our conversation, edited for clarity:

Can you help me understand your background a bit?

I grew up in Philadelphia and eventually made my way to Vermont, where I went to school. While I was there, I did an econometrics paper on the cause-and-effect relationship between alcohol and GPA and found that for every class you miss, your GPA takes a certain hit. That was where my interest in understanding “why things happen” came from.

I started my career at a social media start-up, and we were eventually acquired by a larger automotive company focused on digital marketing. That company was then acquired twice more. I had an entrepreneurial drive, which led me to start going to garage sales and selling things online as a side hustle, and that’s what prepared me to take the next step at a SaaS start-up.

What is SearchLight?

In October 2021, I started working at SearchLight full-time. Based on feedback from family and friends, we believed there was an opportunity to help contractors market and really understand where their revenue is coming from.

Over the past two years, we validated the idea, iterated, and now offer a full-blown “lead to revenue” measurement product. We plug contractors’ CRMs, social ad accounts, and more into our data-matching engine, match the data, and present it to them in an easy-to-understand way. We look at customer acquisition costs, average tickets, closed revenue, and return on ad spend to help them understand where revenue is coming from and where the leaks are.

And we’ve gotten good at not just finding the data, but consulting brands on how to use the data to improve business outcomes.

What works, or doesn’t work, when marketing as an HVAC contractor?

What doesn’t work is having the wrong data. We like to say that if your agency or vendor considers increased conversion volume as a success without looking at whether or not those conversions turned into revenue, it’s not a good sign.

What works is having the data to look at your revenue flow and find the leaks. Is it unsold estimates from a certain channel? In some markets, there’s no competition on Bing, for example, so having good data can inform you on where to invest more or less. And seeing previous data, too. Which channels have generated the most revenue, historically?

How is data transforming the home service industries?

It’s going to drive a certain level of sophistication going forward. Predictive models will be used to analyze budgets so you can see recommended marketing spend and expected return.

There will be Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) that help contractors understand customers and profitability — how likely is this customer to sign up for a maintenance plan? Or how do they want to be talked to? If a homeowner booked online the last seven times, you should know how that homeowner prefers to interact.

The other part is activating data. It’s one thing to measure what’s going on, but another to “activate” it, and that’s the future. For example, contractors could know when there are 57 customers in a neighborhood whose equipment’s useful life is running up within 6 months, and get a marketing campaign going.

What’s not talked about enough when it comes to marketing in HVAC?

What keeps me up at night is data accuracy. It drives me nuts. Agencies can’t get by anymore with just clicks, leads, and impressions. I see solutions being sold in Facebook groups based on these numbers, and it’s not right. People are relying on numbers that are incorrect or mismeasured. A lot of nuanced details are ignored.

There are questions that contractors can ask to poke holes in agency conversations, like:

• How are you measuring to revenue? Do you know which % of my revenue comes from inbound phone calls?

• What happens if a customer comes through multiple channels, multiple times — how do you handle multi-touch?

• If you’re manually logging into my ad accounts to access the data, and we change our spending amounts mid-month, how do you make sure you don’t miss that?

If could have dinner with anyone in history, who would it be?

Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Jordan would be cool, but they’re living, so my real answer is Abraham Lincoln.

I think if you’re truly innovative, people will disagree with you, and you have to find ways to rally around that. There were parallels to that during his presidency. People around him were worried about him, but he maintained conviction in what he was doing.