Seven ways to optimise your leads and win business

CEO Benjamin Dyer of Powered Now shares ideas on how to get the most from your leads.

Every lead should be valued and nurtured. That’s absolutely the way to behave if you want to grow your business. But the opportunity can easily be blown before a quotation is even produced, because every contact with the customer has the potential to be a step towards winning the job.

 

Idea 1: Get personal – Email isn’t always good for business. The face-to-face meeting has the benefit that you can start building a relationship with the customer and your attitude will go a long way to setting the scene on how your quote will be received.

There’s also the chance to find opportunities for other work that may not have been obvious from the first communication. If your company is larger and you can’t attend, it’s important that your management team doesn’t push face-to-face contact too far down the chain.

James Chandler of Chandler Building puts it this way: “It’s important that you see the client in the flesh. That’s why I visit every job at the start myself.”

This helps your company to see every job from the client’s perspective, and to better understand their motivations.

 

Idea 2: Keep your promises – In every interaction with your prospect you should prove trustworthy because successful selling is based on establishing trust.

Your very first phone call starts this process and it is critical that at every step you display a professional attitude and manner. That’s why getting back to customers quickly is important and turning up on time for every appointments is critical. If you fail on these scores, the customer will automatically think that if you’re like this before you get the job, what will you be like after you have won it.

Powered Now recently surveyed more than 1,000 homeowners and 83% reported that their biggest frustration with trade companies was them not turning up when they said.

 

Idea 3: Make it easy to do business with you – If you are smaller, a pleasant answer phone message and always getting back quickly makes it easier to work with you. In fact, your speed of response, especially in turning round quotes, is a critical factor. Make sure that everything the customer says is noted down, nothing is more frustrating than having to repeat things.

 

Idea 4: Be credible – If you are selling to residential customers, many of them won’t have a clue about building regulations and any other applicable statutes or laws, so it’s up to you to explain, without being patronising.

You also need to make a point of letting the customer know about your membership of any trade associations, qualifications, experience and any warranties you will provide. Letting them know you have done equivalent work elsewhere, along with offering references from satisfied customers, all go towards establishing your credibility.

 

Idea 5: British customers like the soft sell – You, of course, you need to be selling at all times when you are in contact with the prospect, but they mustn’t notice it. That’s the British culture. The minute they tell you that “you’re a good sales person” you have failed.

One soft way of selling is to provide illustrations of previous jobs showing how neat your work is. Running through exactly what the customer wants, playing back their requests, helps you to be sure you understand which also sells you. Every little helps.

 

Idea 6: Set the correct price expectations – Nobody likes a surprise so it’s important to try to get the prospect to be thinking about a price range that the job is likely to be quoted for.

 

Idea 7: Close gently – There’s nothing magic about closing business, with the right trust established, the right expectations on price and a professional quotation, the client will already be there. However, make sure that you ask the prospect for their business, but do this naturally. “Is there a date when it would work for us to start?” or “Would you like me to put the job into our calendar?” is the type of approach to take.

Delivering a great job is critical, but you don’t even get the chance if you can’t sell. The biggest influence on sales is establishing trust and this comes from how you and your team come across in every single interaction with your customer.

By far the easiest sales come from recommendations, where you start the whole sales process with initial trust already established. So the good news is that doing a great job remains critical to growth, as well as being an undoubted source of pride in your work.

 

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About the author

Benjamin Dyer is CEO and co-founder of Powered Now. Powered Now’s mobile app aims to take the pain out of paperwork for builders and construction companies as well as other field trade businesses.

www.powerednow.com

 

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