Garrett McElhannon has a way of making automation sound almost … inevitable.
That's intentional.
"The majority of the work is done setting things up," says McElhannon, a FieldRoutes senior Pro account manager who has walked dozens of pest control companies through Marketing Pro. "Once they're set up and running, they just run."
That's the pitch. That's also the point.
For pest control operators who didn't go into business to become marketing managers, the promise of a system that largely takes care of itself, while building stronger relationships with customers and more efficient workflows, is the thing that gets their attention.
What McElhannon likes to explain is what that actually looks like in practice.
Cross-sell and upsell campaigns: Consider this cross-sell scenario: A pest control company that wants to upsell existing customers on mosquito service. Using Marketing Pro, the operator builds a segment—customers with active pest control subscriptions who don't yet have mosquito—and launches a campaign aimed at that audience.
From that point, the software does the heavy lifting. New customers who fit the criteria join the campaign automatically. Customers who sign up for mosquito are removed automatically. The revenue gets attributed automatically.
"What if they sign up at 5:00 on a Friday?" McElhannon says. "You add the subscription, and then you're like, 'I'm going out to dinner. I'm done.' And then Saturday, an email is scheduled to go out for a bigger discount. Now what?"
Without automation, that's a problem. A customer who just paid full price receiving an email offering a better deal and calling Monday morning to ask about it. With Marketing Pro integrated into the FieldRoutes database, it doesn't happen. The moment the subscription is added, the customer is out of the campaign.
That integration—native, requiring no additional configuration once Marketing Pro access is granted—is what makes the automation practical rather than theoretical. Whatever happens in FieldRoutes is reflected in Marketing Pro.
Welcome emails: The moment a new customer card is created in FieldRoutes, Marketing Pro can fire a welcome email automatically. No manual trigger is required. Same logic applies to win-back campaigns for canceled customers and lead-nurturing sequences that follow up on open estimates across multiple days without anyone lifting a finger.
After they click: A customer who opens a mosquito upsell email is a different prospect than one who clicks through to the website. Marketing Pro can route them into a separate cadence, one with a stronger offer and more urgency, automatically.
"You can create a basic segment with everyone you want to cross-sell mosquito to," McElhannon says, "but then those that you feel like have interest because they clicked can go into another one."
E-commerce: An embeddable tool operators can add to their website, the E-Commerce Online Widget, extends the automation to customer acquisition. When a prospect visits the site, requests a quote, and signs up for service, Marketing Pro automatically creates a customer card in FieldRoutes, with billing information saved.
The operator's next step is simply to schedule the appointment. Even an incomplete transaction generates value: If someone enters contact information, gets to the pricing page, and exits without signing up, the operator still receives the lead.
"All they've got to do is go service it," McElhannon says.
None of this requires a marketing department. It doesn't require daily monitoring. What it does require, McElhannon says, is simply deploying it.
"The only way this doesn't work for you," he says, "is if you don't use it."
