Home Service Lead Handling Tips
If you’re a brilliant homemaker, you may be just a hop-skip away from creating your own home services company.
Love gardening? You could hire a crew and set up a garden services business, trimming lawns and doing yard cleanups. Or unleash your creative genius as a landscape architect.
If you’re passionate about cleaning and organising, you could set up a cleaning business; cleaning windows, homes or guesthouses.
If adding colour and finishing touches to homes makes you happy, you could start a painting or decorating business. Or work for Estate Agents staging houses for sale. There’s only so many times you can change the colour and move around the furniture in your own home.
Now… How to Sell Your Services?
The thing about starting your own business is you may not be that comfortable handling every aspect of your business. No business can thrive without sales which means you’ll have to learn the ropes or outsource.
Here’s a quick crash course.
There are three main things to focus on, lead generation, lead conversion and customer retention, which simply means finding prospects, converting those prospects into customers and then keeping your customers happy.
All of this can be summed up in one phrase: Home Service Lead Management and one of the leading companies in this field is Pronexis. Their gorgeous video describes the process perfectly.
1. Generating Leads
The first thing you’ll need to focus on is how to generate leads for your home services business.
Word-of-mouth is usually the best way to build a business but it can take some time. You can help build social proof by making sure you have a lot of positive reviews on your website and social media pages.
Here are 5 great ways to position yourself as an expert in your field:
- Create an e-book that you give away to free to potential customers
- Publish articles on authority sites
- Post inspirational and informative content on your blog and social media pages
- Identify your prospective client’s pain points and offer solutions
- Get very clear on your unique selling proposition, what value you offer and what differentiates you from your competitors
For an awesome selection of top lead generation tips, have a read of this superb post at Fit Small Business: Top 25 Home Improvement Lead Generation Ideas from the Pros.
2. Converting Leads into Sales
Now you need to turn your prospects into Customers. Here are our top tips on doing that.
- Follow up as quickly as possible
- Ask your prospects if they have any questions
- Offer great advice
- Promote your unique selling proposition
- Ask for the order
- And then stop talking and wait for their answer
Many business owners and even seasoned sales people lose the sale at this final crucial step because they start overselling. Trust that you’ve already done the sales and marketing by this point and just allow your customer to give your offer their consideration.
Oh, wait, there’s one more step I recommend.
7. Handling Objections – be prepared with some answers to typical objections your clients may have.
When handling objections, make sure you start with… I know how you feel, I felt the same way or I would feel the same way if I were in your shoes and then end with set their mind at ease by explaining your solutions to these challenges or issues.
3. Customer Retention
The best way to get repeat business from customers is to give them more than they were expecting. Go above and beyond the call of duty whenever you can. Or offer the friendliest service around.
Do whatever it takes to stand out from your competitors.
Building customer retention is all about building relationships. When you know what your client’s pain points are and you address them, promptly and effectively, you have a winning success formula.
And don’t forget to ask for reviews and referrals from your happy customers.
What’s been your biggest stumbling block in your business to-date? Do sales come naturally to you or is it something you’ve had to work on or outsource?
