When your marketing activities pay off and the leads start flowing in, it helps if you can score those leads according to opportunity. This approach gives you an edge by allowing you to focus your sales and marketing efforts more effectively.
If you’ve already defined your target market, you’ve already got the upper hand. However, these days a spreadsheet is not enough to manage all your leads. To level up even more, consider implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution.
What is a CRM solution? Fundamentally, it is a software tool that tracks your customers and prospects throughout their journey with your company. At a glance, you can look at a contact and see how they found you, if you’ve connected with them, if they made it to the proposal stage, and if they are due for repairs or an upgrade. It’s a single tool for managing everyone you do business with.
Additionally, a CRM system will show you any service calls, complaints that you’ve resolved, or upsell opportunities. It can take some time to set up a CRM (although most allow you to import your contacts from a spreadsheet), but the business implications are enormous.
Many CRM systems are huge and expensive, but there’s also a range of solutions that are free or reasonably priced for small contracting businesses. Forbes Advisor has a list of free solutions that may be a good place to start your search.
Nurturing Your Contracting Leads/Customers
Nurturing in this context means maintaining and growing the relationship between you and a customer or prospect. Keep in touch with past customers through avenues like a monthly newsletter. Send them a mailer when it’s time to have their project maintained or inspected. These opportunities build up over time and equal a better bottom line.
In addition, nurturing can directly lead to referrals for your residential contracting business.