Construction Leads – A Waste or Just Wasted

Generating consumer leads is a crucial part of any small to medium sized local construction business. Whether you’re buying leads from a third party, generating them through your own marketing or simply getting referrals from past customers you have to be on top of your game to turn your construction leads into paying customers. Over the past few years I’ve paid close attention to how businesses typically manage their leads and I wanted to share my insights on how to maximize your consumer leads.

In a recent study by Harvard Business Review we learn that lead response times are crucial to making any construction lead work.

Many Construction Businesses Are Slow To Respond

We audited 2,241 U.S. companies, measuring how long each took to respond to a web-generated test lead. Although 37% responded to their lead within an hour, and 16% responded within one to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours—and 23% of the companies never responded at all. The average response time, among companies that responded within 30 days, was 42 hours.

As you can see, it’s crucial to contact leads as soon as you get them. Put yourself in the consumers shoes, for example just the other day as I began my research to find a solar company I called a top reviewed company from Angie’s List and they took a message and said they would call me back. Well, as soon as I hung up with them I called the next person on Angie’s List. People are no longer patient and society is adapting to getting instant results. Yes, there’s a small percent of people that will wait for you but the number is daunting.

Numbers from Lead Response Management that should motivate you to treat all your leads like 5ct diamonds.

1. The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times.
2. The odds of calling to contact a lead decrease by over 10 times in the 1st hour.
3. After 20 hours every additional dial your salespeople make actually hurts your ability to make contact.

Now that you’re planning on calling all your construction leads within one minute of receiving them let’s talk about what should happen on that first contact.

First off, if you don’t have great communication skills and your English is broken, you should let someone else call the leads or you will be decreasing your chance of earning the business. I recently conducted an experiment by submitting leads on a few large lead generation providers websites and the results were a bit scary. I discovered:

1. Many businesses never called (my opening point to this whitepaper).
2. Of the businesses that did call a select few where good communicators.
3. The quickest call I received was within 15 minutes of submitting my lead.
4. Most of the businesses seemed to have one goal in mind “meeting me in person”.
5. There was not a single follow up from any of the businesses. No emails, no call backs, no social media contacts etc…
6. None of the businesses seemed to really care about what I was looking to do, they mostly came off like they deserved my business.

Here are a few pointers for the first lead contact:

• I can’t say it enough, be the first to call a lead so you increase your chances of speaking with the potential customer.
• When the customer picks up the phone don’t use words like “hey” or “what’s up”. Always introduce yourself professionally on the first call. For example say, “Hi {Customer Name}, this is Aaron from XYZ Construction Company and I received your information regarding our landscaping services. Thanks for taking the time to contact us, what can I help you with”.
• Don’t sell yourself at all on the first call, simply try to build rapport and understand the persons needs. Your objective should be to make an amazing first impression.
• No matter what the customer wants (obviously within reason) you should be willing to cater to their needs. If the customer wants a price over the phone don’t tell them that’s impossible unless you see the job. Even if it is impossible to give a true price be smart about how you respond.
• Don’t be forceful or arrogant on the call, no one likes a pushy salesman.
• No matter what the outcome of the call is remember the basic rule “the customer is always right” and when the customer is wrong revert to the customer is always right.
• Once you’ve introduced yourself and carefully listened to the customer’s needs/goals this is your chance to shine as a professional and set yourself ahead of the rest. Repeat everything back to the customer about their needs and make sure it’s clear and then tell them how you can help meet their needs.
• By re-confirming the customer’s needs you’re subconsciously showing them you care and pay attention to details.
• Now that you’ve had a good conversation with the customer and hopefully built some rapport you’re 100 times more likely to get a chance to meet the customer in person or provide an estimate.
• When setting an appointment for something like home improvements don’t lead in with statements about coming to give a price etc, instead tell the customer you want to see the project in person to help them get a better idea of what it will take to meet their needs.
• Be prepared, know your schedule and offer the customer a few times you’re available to meet with them and then book the appointment.
• Before ending the call make sure you have all their contact information correct and be sure to get their email.
• Within the next 3 hours, if you have time I strongly recommend sending an email to the customer thanking them for their time on the phone and that you look forward to meeting them in person.
• If you schedule an appointment, the day before give the customer a courtesy call and confirm the appointment.
• You may think this is a lot of hoops to jump through but the reality is your creating a positive experience with the customer that they won’t get from 99% of your local competitors and in the end you will standout when it comes time to make a hiring decision.

DON’T BE LATE FOR THE APPOINTMENT!

Even when you do everything right, you won’t always get the appointment or job but that doesn’t mean the lead wasn’t worth your time.

“This is where 99% of businesses drop the ball”

You’ve got a customer’s information, you’ve built rapport with them but you forget to stay in-touch. I strongly recommend for customers you speak with and don’t do any work for, to put them on a special list and fire up some email marketing, send them a thank you card and do what it takes to imprint your amazing services in the back of their mind. Because in the end you will get business from the customer but only if they remember how great you where. I also recommend you follow up with customers 1 week after you spoke with them and see how the job went and if you can assist with anything else, you’d be surprised at how much business this will earn you.

No matter how you got a lead it’s yours to nourish and ultimately it’s up to you to create opportunities from leads. Don’t get caught up in the short term sale, look bigger, think smarter and I guarantee your business will do better.