It's all in the follow up....Touch your customers.......

Okay now I have your attention, I obviously don't mean touch your customers physically, you'll just end up with a criminal record! I'd prefer that didn't happen!

How to convert more quotes to customers

What I mean is, the more contact you have with your potential customer the more likely they are to use you for the job, you'll show that you give a better service and care about them.

So you've sent your quote to your customer and wait for the phone to ring.........and you wait and you wait.

If this is you and it more than likely is, as this is what the majority of business owners do, I'll guarantee you're losing money and in more ways than one.

How much contact can you have?

The more contact you have the better, It'll keep you in your customers mind. After you've sent a quote out there are points you contact the customer to get to the front of their mind. 

Your first call should be to make contact to see if they got the quote and this should be done within 24 to 48 hours of sending it.

If you send your quotes out via email you can use email tracking to see when the potential customer has opened the email, then you know you can call them, if you use gmail you can use YesWare which tells you when the email has been opened or any links clicked on.

I have sent quotes out before and they had not been received because either it got lost in the post or I'd got the email wrong, so it's really important that you do this if just to check!

Your second call if they have not already asked you to go ahead with the work or had a look at your quote properly will be to see if they have any questions and this should be done around 48 hours after the first call.

Your next point of contact (should you not get the work) should be to send a card to say thanks for giving you the opportunity to quote and should they need your services in the future you hope they will think of you (If you do this, they certainly will)

Get marketing information

If you've not won the work it's a great idea to find out why, if you find that the reason reoccurs often, then you can change your approach for futures quotes.

If it's price then you can be sure that the customer hasn't seen what value you offer, you can then work on ways to make sure future customers will! 

 

If you get in early enough, you could even ask for a copy of a competitors quote to see if you could match or beat it, by getting a copy of the quote you also get to see how your competitor quotes and if they do anything that stands out that you could incorporate into the way you work! If you don't call though you won't get any information.

Keeping in contact with past customers

It's also important to keep in touch with customers you have done work for, this may be through a newsletter, Christmas card or just a call to make sure everything is okay.

I wrote more about this in the post How trades people and property businesses throw money away  

To your success

Paul

Integrity marketing in business

The importance of having integrity in business

I once went to a job, where a ladies storage heater had stopped working!

She had called me up the day before, but before I went to have a look at it, I had said to her that it would be best for her to check the fuses first and see if it came on that night before calling me out and having to charge her.

She did this and then called me the next morning to say it still wasn't working, I went round to have a look at it, and found the problem to be the cut out switch inside the heater, which was a ten minute job. So I reset the heater and was well.

As I was leaving she said thanks and that I was the only one who had been honest with her, she had called 4 other companies and all had told her she would need a new heater installed which would have cost a fair bit.

I like to be honest it’s one of my core values, but from that I had a customer for life. I know some people try it on but I was 1 out of 5, I find that disgraceful, that so many people do this. I really appreciated her comments and it gave me a buzz that she was a happy customer.

Integrity marketing

You do hear of people getting ripped off in all businesses but I believe it to be detrimental to running a good business as eventually word will eventually get round, especially if you take business networking!

I've seen it in networking groups before and it's the same with local communities too, certain business owners lose trust with the people around them and therefore no one refers them work and so they lose out, this is hugely costly.

Trying to make a quick few hundred pounds on a job, eventually loses potentially thousands, but also on top of that cost means that a company will have to spend even more on marketing to acquire new customers.

I think it makes sense to use what I call integrity marketing and always do what is best for the customer that way they'll use your services again and likely refer you to others! Not only that, it's what has given the building trade a bad name over the years and gives the media something to chew on for their next program.

Do you have any stories of where a customer was potentially ripped of but you saved them time or money, I'd love to hear them.



To your success
 Paul

How trades people and property businesses can lose money!

Most trades and property businesses are throwing money away by not using this simple marketing tool

I can pretty much guarantee that reading this post will make your trade or property business more money over the next few years!

And this one sentence if you read no more, will do that:- 

"Keep in touch with your customers"

Most trades do not keep in touch and continue marketing to their customers and it means they are losing money, I think it's because most are thinking about the next job rather than long term!

If you're not staying in touch with your customers and letting them know you're still around, the next time they need your services you'll potentially be forgotten about and the simplest way for them to find someone else is to get on to Google and if they don't find you they're going to your competitor!

Let's take a heating engineer who would be one of the best examples, once a customer has had a boiler service with them the company should have a system to make sure the customer is contacted again in 11 months time to schedule in another service and then do the same for the following year and so on! 

The system doesn't have to be any special computer software, you can use a simple card system or Google calendar and just set a reminder so you know when to call.

Marketing to customers to stay in their minds

Of course just staying in touch with those customers once per year just isn't enough and the more you stay in touch the more money you'll make because you'll be in their mind more often and the more you're in their mind when they need one of your other services you're the one they'll call also the bigger chance you'll come up in conversation if a friend or family member needs your service and so get a referral.

There are so many ways to stay in touch with your customers and clients these days I can and probably will write a blog post for each at some point! However you have to make it useful and relevant to them and you need to find creative reasons to stay in touch!

Some ways to stay in touch

When staying in touch it's important to share useful and relevant things with your customer otherwise they'll just tune your marketing out eventually

• You could email tips and news!  
• A regular newsletter, and a printed one not email. 
• A simple phone call or card on an anniversary, birthday or at Christmas.
• Send them your latest blog post and maybe even blog about them
• Social media

Social media is a great and powerful way to stay in touch, with social media you can stay in touch all year round if you wanted to.

If your customer happens to run a business the best thing you can do is help them find more business or connect with others that they could have a great working relationship with!

This is a massive subject and this post does not do it justice I could write a whole book about it, but if you put these simple ideas in to action it'll make you a lot of money for your business!

If you've had a creative way to stay in touch with a customer I'd love to hear it.



To your marketing success
Paul Jennings

Small marketing goals

In a recent post I spoke about setting small marketing goals and that you should plan them every week. With that post I really only scratched the surface, So I thought I'd cover it in a little bit more detail.

If you don't have marketing goals for your trade business, you are just literally working week to week and not knowing what will be happening or where the next job is coming from, sometimes hoping to strike it lucky with a job.

This is why so many businesses and it seems especially with trades suffer from feast or famine, they either have too much work or not enough!

If you are looking to grow your business and take people on, you cannot live business life like that, marketing is how you get business in, it does not just drop in to your lap, every job you have ever done is because of something you've done or said in the past.

Choose and plan your marketing goals

You cannot just use one or two ways to market your business and these days there is no need to, there are so many free or low cost ways to market your business and 'fill the bucket' you should be doing as many as possible, I'd say a minimum of 5 to start with.

Just reading this blog will give you ideas of the marketing tools you may want to use for your trade or property business.

You then set a goal of how many customers you expect to get from that activity, if you don't know what your return on that marketing activity should be, your goal should be to find out by testing.

Put your marketing plan into action.

Once you've decided what marketing you're going to do, you need to add it to your diary, decide what days you'll work on your business and don't change it for anything but emergencies, Your job as a business owner is to get customers if you're out all the time doing the work you're not getting customers, no customers means you'll go into famine.

Read my post on writing a simple marketing plan

Even if you do 30 minutes of marketing a day it'll grow your business over time. If you do this it'll have a snowball effect and really pick up momentum!



To your success

Paul Jennings 
Marketing for Trades


PS if you really are too busy to do your own marketing for your trade or property business and are based in the Hertfordshire area, why not let me do it for you with my done for you marketing service

Don't do what every other business does!

Sticking to the marketing norm will stunt your growth!

I once sat down with a non trade business owner and we got talking about business and marketing and I suggested he try promoting his business with flyers, he bluntly shot my idea down and dismissed it saying it wouldn't work for him!

I asked if he'd ever tried it to which I got the reply of no because it doesn't work! So I asked him how he knew, to which he told me he had spoken to a larger competitor who had told him it doesn't work......

A few months later I was talking to someone in the same industry and mentioned this, I got the reply 'that's how I get most of my business!'

Try different routes to market

So my moral of my story is that you should try every avenue of marketing your business, what didn't work for one business doesn't mean it won't work for you, there are lots of variables and so long as you do small manageable low cost tests. 

On top of this you should try variations of the same marketing method, so if you want to try doing a flyer drop do 2 different versions of it with a different message on each. One may not work or work as well as the other, you may try an offer on one and none on the other to test the response that you get, then you can take the one that worked well and do a different version of that.

What marketing have you seen in a different industry that you can try in your trade or property business?



To your marketing success

Paul Jennings

The 4 Step marketing plan for your trade business.

A simple 4 Step marketing plan

Most tradespeople I speak to have no plan for their marketing, no plan means no direction to growth no way to get what you want from your business.

Churchill said 'Fail to plan, plan to fail' and this applies well to many things but very well to marketing!

Now if you have started your business as a lifestyle business, that's okay although the the stuff I put out probably isn't for you, however if you want to grow a real business and you've not got a plan and I mean one that's written down on paper (it's no good just in your head) then you have a lifestyle business, so this blog post is about getting that plan down on paper and the key things you need to create a basic marketing plan for your trade or property business.

Here are the 4 key steps you need to think about and have in your plan.

Step 1. Who are your customers and clients?

Knowing who your target market are, is really, really important and the answer here can't be anyone.
You don't want to be going to quote for jobs for people who want you to work for £10 an hour or those that don't understand the value you give them!  
Build a picture of them and what they do, their interests and their family the house they live in.

Step 2. What will you tell them?

What is your USP, why should they use you and pay your price?
And more importantly can you prove that you can deliver what you say or do you have a guarantee that says what happens if you don't?

Step 3. How will you get your message out?

You need to detail how you'll spread your message, the actual marketing you'll be doing and you need to have many ways to market your business and be doing many things all at the same time not just one! 
It may be Networking, Pay Per Click, Flyers, Social media, Direct mail, Blogging and articles or one of the many other ways to market your business.

Step 4. When will you do this?

You need to plan when you're going to do your marketing, you need to figure out how much time you're going to put into getting new customers and clients, they are the life blood of your business and what puts the food on the table so if you're not working on getting more you've got a stagnating or dying business.




So hopefully as you've been reading through this simplified marketing plan you've made some notes on your 4 step marketing plan, If not grab a sheet of paper now and write it down, strike while the iron is hot as they say and then follow through!



To your marketing success

Paul Jennings

How to grow your business little by little

Too busy to be marketing your business

I hear from so many trades people that say 'they are too busy to do this or too busy to do that' and that they don't have an hour a day to focus on marketing their business! Is this you and your business?

This is why so many trades and property businesses suffer from feast or famine, they only start marketing when the well is dry, there is an old saying of 'don't wait until you're thirsty to dig your well' and this applies to marketing so well.

So how do we get out of a marketing feast or famine

The best way is to set goals for the week, just small simple goals it may be work on a website page, sending out letters to potential commercial clients or even some customer service calls/ follow up calls to make sure everything is okay.

So lets take the marketing goal of sending out some letters to get commercial clients, If you set yourself a goal of sending out up to 5 letters per day to potential commercial clients at the end of the week you'd have sent out 25 letters, not a lot however over a year that's around 1300 letters! It all adds up!

Breaking down your marketing

Look at your marketing activities as a drip in a bucket

Just by doing a little bit everyday you break it down and make it manageable. Keep doing it and making small marketing goals and you'll never experience a famine! Like a drip in a bucket eventually the bucket will be filled and it's the same with marketing, it all adds up.

You do need to plan these goals too, so be sure to set a planning time during the week when you sit down and just focus on growing your business this may be on a Sunday for the week ahead.

Over time you'll see results from these little marketing activities.

To your marketing success

Paul Jennings

Marketing for Trades