205.721.8660Get More Revenue from your Leads
Everyone likes leads, but when we ask our home service clients why they want more leads, they tell us, “to bring in more revenue to grow our company.” This brings us to an important point.
More leads equate to more revenue only if you have proper lead intake and opportunity dispatch processes in place. Did you know that HVAC and Plumbing companies that invest in improving their lead conversion hover at 80-95% close rates? And those who invest in opportunity dispatch not only field more service calls but average a higher value per dispatch? By leveraging their lead intake and opportunity dispatch processes, these companies are growing into 10-20 million-dollar businesses. And they’re maximizing their return on ad spend.
Care to join them? Let’s talk about how we can help you join the ranks of the growing elite.
How to Improve Your Lead Intake and Dispatch Processes
Generate Qualified Leads by partnering with a marketing provider that specializes in the home services.
Your marketing provider should have a deep understanding of the services you offer, the price point of those services, the value of those services to you, who your ideal customers are, and what that decision process looks like from awareness to purchase. They will use targeting and develop ad copy that gets you in front of the right people with the right message to generate those leads.
Install call tracking and listen to your inbound calls.
Your marketing provider should track all your digital marketing efforts, including call tracking and recording for each of your campaigns. If your provider doesn’t offer call tracking, find an agency that does.
We listen to each of our clients’ inbound calls and encourage our clients to do the same– it’s how you know whether the calls are qualified leads and how you recover lost leads. It’s also how you calculate the value of each call, your conversion rate, and ultimately the revenue generated by the campaign.
Tips for Handling Service Calls
As we’ve listened to inbound calls, we’ve recognized mistakes home service companies make that cost them quality leads. And we advise our clients on how to manage those leads better. Want to know the best part about it? By investing time in lead management, they get a much better return on their ad spend and bring in more revenue. Below are some of our best practices:
- Answer the calls. Assign dedicated team members to answer inbound calls or outsource to a customer service representative team who can do so. A large number of missed calls represent a large amount of lost revenue in the home service sector. Your customers often have urgent issues and will move on to the competition when they can’t reach you. If your phone receptionist team is busy, have a roll-over solution so that someone is always tending to incoming calls.
- Ensure your call team is polite, knowledgeable, and empathetic. Many inbound leads have an urgent matter that is creating discomfort. An example might be an overflowing toilet or an AC system that’s pushing out warm air in the Summer. Empathy and expediency are what inbound leads want from you when they call.
- Ask the right questions. When prospects are calling and requesting your service, there’s no need to “beat around the bush.” Be resolution-oriented by politely asking for them to specify the issue and its importance, informing them that your team of experts can help, and then asking them if they’d like a technician to make the service call. What do most prospects desire to learn during the call?
- If you can solve their problem
- Why they should choose you
- When you can solve their problem – gear your inbound lead questions around these main points.
- Listen attentively. Pause and let the lead talk. As Contracting Business so aptly puts it, “Listen in order to FIND. Listen in order to understand their point of view, their challenges, their concerns, their objectives. Once you know what the prospect really wants, learn why they want it and what it will mean to them to achieve it. Only then are you in a position to offer solutions that will help them reach their goals.”
- Implement Opportunity Dispatch. Work smarter, not harder. Answer all the calls, but be smart about how they’re booked and run.
“As an [HVAC] industry, we have always viewed the dispatch board as a giant to-do list. But there’s a flaw in this type of thinking,” says Nexstar. “That flaw is that once the list is full, we stop taking any more calls. This is where we do our customers and our company a disservice.”
Opportunity Dispatch is the solution to this flaw. And it can be likened to how hospital emergency rooms triage patients. Broken units or potentially damaged units are like the head wounds that get fast-tracked to the doctors (technicians), while you might ask those with minor issues (maintenance calls) to wait until tomorrow.
Yes, you’ll run the risk of angering those who have to wait, but it’s for the greatest good of all, your business and your customers. And, as Nexstar points out, those customers who are upset that you can’t get their maintenance call today would want you to drop everything if they had a more severe issue.
By being strategic in your dispatch, you’re able to prioritize high-value calls and still handle the others in due time in the same way that hospitals deliver care to all patients.
You’ll never please everyone, but you can take peace in the following – taking care of customers with the greatest need will always be the right decision.
Take Your Business to the Next Level
A strong lead intake and opportunity dispatch process will yield the best results for your customers and your business. It sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? You can have your cake and eat it, too. You just have to invest time and energy into the processes.
Strong Lead Intake and Opportunity Dispatch are well worth the investment and will help you achieve a strong revenue stream to weather the ebbs and flows of the seasons and take your business to the next level.
Do you need help generating and making the most of your leads? Let’s chat!
