Are you buying leads from companies who promise qualified leads, but aren’t having much luck closing them? This article is for you. Read on!
Misconceptions about Qualified Leads
It’s very important for your leads to be qualified. They need to have the desire and the ability to buy from you. That being said, it’s easy to get “qualification” and “likelihood to buy” mixed up. You may feel that if a lead is qualified - they’re a homeowner, they’re ready to buy, and they have money - they’re pretty much a guaranteed sale.
Unfortunately, just because a lead is qualified doesn’t mean they’ll buy from you. It just means that they meet the very first requirement. To make the sale, you need two more things - Trust and Visibility. Let’s take a look at both.
How to Make the Sale
Trust
Let’s say you’re in front of the perfect customer. They want to remodel their kitchen, they want to get started right away, and they have six figures in savings. Not to mention, they’re looking for value and not just for the cheapest price. You’re guaranteed to sell them, right?
No. In order for the customer to write you that first deposit check, there needs to be something else - trust. They need to believe in you and your ability to deliver exactly what they’re looking for.
Visibility
In today’s world homeowners are bombarded with ads, calls, emails, and texts. If you’re not making yourself visible to your customer, you could be forgotten entirely.
In Spencer Powel’s book The Remodeler Marketing Blueprint, he talks about three stages of the homeowner buying journey:
- Top of Funnel (or TOF)
- Middle of Funnel (or MOF)
- Bottom of Funnel (or BOF)
If a prospect reaches out to your company, and they’re TOF or MOF, they probably won’t buy from you right away. This is where it becomes extremely important to make sure your customer remembers you, if nothing else.
This also applies to homeowners you’ve already sent an estimate to. If they’re hearing from or seeing your competitors more than you, you’ll quickly be forgotten.
Creating Trust & Visibility
So now that we’ve talked about how important visibility and trust are, here’s what you can do to be more trusted and be more visible!
To be more trusted:
- Show your reviews to potential customers
- Show the customer pictures of your work (don’t assume they’ve seen them already.)
- Present well with a nice company shirt, be clean, and smell good
- Video content on your website and/or “Thank You” pages
To be more visible:
- Nurture your TOF and MOF leads with email
- Send email & text reminders for sales appointments
- Call your new leads fast and often
- Engage with your new leads with text
If you want to learn more about building an effective sales process, check out this article.
Also, if you’re in the process of considering other sources to get qualified leads, here are 11 ways to get more qualified remodeling leads.
Referrals vs. Leads
If you’re like most contractors, you’ve gotten your business to a certain point through referrals and then for some reason or other decided to dip your toes into buying leads (or spending money on marketing.)
What’s important to understand is that there’s a big difference between leads you get through marketing and referred customers.
Referred customers are usually already sold on you. They talked to a friend who showed them their beautiful new bathroom or kitchen, and a lot of trust was already built up for you.
But leads that come through marketing are coming from a totally different mindset. They saw an ad (either from your company or a third party lead company) and decided to fill out their information. They may be qualified, but there’s virtually no trust yet and only a little bit of visibility.
This is why it can be so confusing to make the transition from referrals to leads. Most contractors close between 70% and 90% of their referred customers, but a healthy closing rate for new leads is more like 25% to 40%. It often comes as a shock when you suddenly stop closing almost everyone you meet with.
That being said, when you go into it knowing what to expect, your likelihood of success is a lot higher!
Final Thoughts
Service Allies offers lead generation to remodelers and home improvement contractors in general. We also do what we can on our end to build the trust with a sales video and visibility with automated texts and emails. If you’d like to see how our program works, schedule a phone call today.
Thanks for reading!
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