- Advertising Sources– Which mediums and platforms have the most qualified leads? We share where to focus your time and money.
- Numbers– Knowing your numbers is essential to making sure you have enough qualified leads
- Qualification Process– The video will give you a couple of tips to qualify leads before you waste time chasing them
In today’s blog post, let’s explore more on what steps you should take in order to ensure the success of your lead generation efforts. Watch/Listen to the full episode here.
Try Builder Lead Converter right now and see how we plug your opportunity leaks, capture leads, book appointments and help you increase your average sales price and margins. The only thing you have to lose is sales.
Transcript:
Welcome to Conversations that Convert. Every week, we’ll spend about 10 to 15 minutes tackling relevant lead generation, marketing, and sales topics for remodelers, home improvement companies, and home builders. Conversations that Convert is brought to you by Builder Lead Converter. Your perfect sales assistant. And now here’s Rick and Daiana.
Rick: Hey, good after or good morning. Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to Conversations that Convert. And if you are joining us today, please say hi. Let us know you’re here, and if you have a question or a comment or maybe a topic idea, go ahead and drop it in the comments. And if we use it, we will make sure we give you credit. So, Daiana, how are you doing today?
Daiana: I’m doing great. Thank you.
Rick: Everybody. Daiana just got a haircut. So, I had already commented. I said, your hair looks wonderful. So she curls yesterday and today she’s got this nice little bob haircut. So all ready for, for video today. Right, Daiana?
Daiana: Yes. And thank you for noticing.
Rick: But tip to any husbands out there watching. Yes. It’s always good to comment on your wife or significant other when they do something with their hair, for sure. So.
Daiana: Great.
Rick: Anyway, yeah. So how’s everything else going, Daiana?
Daiana: It’s going very well. I’m very curious about this topic today. It’s been my passion lately. So, I’m looking forward to starting and seeing how to keep your pipeline full of qualified leads. That’s my interest.
Rick: Yeah. What do they say? Easier said than done, right? And so this is a topic that we’re always looking at because it’s one thing to generate a lead, it’s another thing to generate a qualified lead. It’s, and yet another thing to convert that qualified lead into a sale. So today we’re gonna really just focus on what are some basic things that you can do to keep your pipeline full. Right now it’s fairly easy. Hey, let’s be honest. There’s a lot of demand out there for home improvement, remodeling, for home building. It’s a little quiet right now. It’s, you know, it’s August. As we’re recording this, you know, school is about ready to start again and, and, we have summer vacations, finishing up. So it’s a little bit quiet. We’re busier with production but, you know, September’s gonna usually tick up a little bit for most businesses, not, not all. And really what we wanna focus on is, how we make ourselves as efficient as possible by working with as many qualified leads as possible. And you know, the first thing, the very first thing that we have to, that we have to do is we, we have to, guys, we gotta stop chasing bad leads. And right now, I know that’s simple. Because you have so many leads, you can turn down business if you want, you know, I, I hear stories all the time about, you know, people not getting called back that reach out to builders, remodelers, home improvement companies. And yeah, if you’re busy, hey, we can’t even handle the business. If you wanted to give it to us, it’s easy to turn ’em down. But when we wanna look at how do we put it in place? In ideology as well as practices where you can always accept new leads but then you have enough of a backlog, which we talked about last week in, in last week’s video is building backlogs. You have enough backlog where you can say no to bad leads. So we wanna make that the first and foremost of this video is to, it’s okay to say no. Stop chasing bad leads.
Daiana: Yes, that’s true. And I’m curious, what’s the second topic?
Rick: Well, so qualified leads. We always go back to the source, the lead source. And we’re gonna go through, you know, real quickly here, the three sources that you should be focusing on because not all leads are created equal or have as good of a source. So, the topic today is keeping your pipeline full of qualified leads. So that starts with number one, referral leads are by far the best lead. These are clients. Client referrals are the best professional. Referrals are, are the second best, always the highest quality, and always the highest converting. So the next one is organic website traffic. And what I mean by organic is, is that somebody did a search and they found your company, and then they opted in to request more information. That is the second highest converting lead where you go from the lead into a sale. And then the third one, Daiana, I know you’re gonna talk a little about, about is, is paid ads and, and leads. What do you, what do you wanna say about those?
Daiana: I think it’s important to have this part. Also to let people know what you are doing and people especially people that don’t know you and don’t know about your services. So it’s another way of letting people know what you’re doing and Yeah.
Rick: I’m sorry. Go ahead. Fi-finish up. I have one other thought.
Daiana: Yeah. So, if you do that, it’s, it’s, it’s good to have, it’s the, it’s the first on the, on the top first. First the second is organic website traffic. But paid ads can also bring you some amazing qualified leads if you know how to automate that and how to work with them.
Rick: So what we want you guys to understand is, is that you really need to be using all three of these lead sources. But first and foremost, focus on getting referral business and plugging the opportunity leaks in your organic website traffic. I bet if I asked 10 of you, do you have a systemized program for generating referral leads? Probably nine, if not all, 10 of you would answer the question. No, we don’t. It just happens organically. We try to do a good job and we hope that that person refers us. You know, there’s a lot more you can do than that and it’s a lot better to focus your attention on building your business around referral business than going out and trying to do paid ads or you know, cold walk-ins, you know, direct mail, that sort of thing. Very, very expensive, very low conversion. Typically a low lead quality. So we’re gonna talk a little bit more, as far as some things that you can do when you get those leads to help you with the qualification process.
Daiana: I’m also curious about the numbers.
Rick: Yeah, the numbers. So knowing your numbers, this is a must for any small business, let alone us in the housing industry. There are three key numbers that you need to know and you know, the first one is how many opportunities does it take in order to get a lead? So that’s always gonna be based on your Google analytics. So your website is obviously your biggest piece of the puzzle when it regards when it comes to generating qualified leads. So how many people do you have on your website every week and how many leads do you typically generate there? So that’s number one, number to know. Number two is how many leads does it take in order to get a qualified lead? Leads to qualified lead? And then the third one of course is how many qualified leads it takes in order to get a sale. So we’re focusing really on the first two here and opportunities to leads and leads to qualified, to qualified leads. But if you are having an issue with getting leads or making sure they’re qualified leads, what do you do? You simply look at, okay, what sort of offer are you serving up to your opportunities? So, and whether it’s, what’s that compelling call to action, we call the lead magnet on your website. And the second one is, is that, what is the source of that traffic? Remember the less organic traffic you have as it relates to referrals and organic website traffic. The poorer the quality is gonna be of those leads. So while paid leads and paid ads are a good way to maybe learn about what is important to your database from a quality standpoint, it’s always gonna be your lowest quality.
Daiana: Great. Amazing. Let’s see what’s next.
Rick: So next we wanna talk about and we’re gonna finish this up to today with the qualification process. I still see a lot of inefficiencies going on here today with, with, with companies where it’s, yeah, they’re getting, you know, you’re getting lots of leads right now, but there’s really no good qualification process and you can spin your wheels and waste a lot of time. So we already talked about don’t chase bad leads. Okay. So that’s step number one is, if, if somebody is not willing to provide you the information you need in order to find out if they’re a good fit for you or not, just say no, just say no. And even in when times are tough, you can waste a lot more time. You’re gonna, you’re, you’re never gonna get the benefit out of that chase the time you spend chasing that bad lead, then you would if you just focused on improving your qualification process. So let’s talk about that. How do we improve our qualification process? Well, number one, we always want to ask the lead to do something. So in other words, lead comes in. It’s part of your follow-up process, and this can all be automated. You wanna ask them to do something before you have a question with them. So, as an example, when in our process, what we always do is we make the lead book an appointment, a time to have a phone call. So what we find is for every 10 leads that we get, about five of ’em will book appointments. The other five are leads we don’t have to chase but how hard is that? You click a link, you pick a date and time to have us call you. So that’s number one is to have them book an appointment, to have a follow-up call. Number two is, and you use this a lot, Daiana, and I’m gonna show an example here, is that you will go ahead in a funnel, which we’re looking at right now on the screen. And you will use some qualifying questions in that funnel. So tell us how this works.
Daiana: Yeah, so, it depends on what’s important for you. So, here in this example, you see that it’s important the location. So you may want to choose from, if you are in the area, then you will know whether you are a qualified lead, or, or not. And, if you choose another location, you, if you choose another outside the, outside the location you’re interested in, then you will know for sure that this lead, that leads will be disqualified automatically by the system. So that’s very helpful when you have some criteria to talk in advance virtually with your lead before you talk with that lead in person. Another way is to, and another important thing might be the budget. So if you know your business and you know that you will not work with people that are investing less than an amount of money, then you can choose to put that on your list, and then you can disqualify or qualify the lead based on the budget that they want to, to spend on your next or future services. So that’s a good way to qualify and disqualify your lead. So, there is no need to talk directly with them so they qualified or disqualified themselves. So, isn’t that smart?
Rick: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, so why do we do this? Well, number one is you, you have a service area, you know. In this case, you maybe only own lots or have neighborhoods in this service area or, you have a territory that you cover that is, that is realistic. And so you put those zip codes on here and if they get outside of those zip codes, it’s not a job you would take anyway. So why chase that lead? So that one is, is self-explanatory. So in this case, we say out outside of the metro Omaha area for this particular client and of course, yeah, that one is the price point. You know, a lot of home builders are like for whatever you’re lock costs are and whatever your product you’re building, you have that floor. So identify whatever that floor is. And if somebody says they’re less than that, then you disqualify them. One thought on this as we, as we discussed this and wrap up today, is that when you do disqualify a lead, Instead of just saying, I’m sorry, we’re not a good fit. Go find somebody else. You know, that doesn’t come off really nice. It comes off sort of prideful and you know, to an ego, if you will. And so that can turn a lot of people off if you don’t ever wanna send someone away, even if you can’t do business with them, where they might say, Ah, you know what? I checked out so and so and they were really rude to me. We don’t ever want to get that out. So what we found is that if you do need to turn someone away, is to turn them away to somebody else. So there’s always gonna be competitors in your area that may serve as a territory that you don’t or that may provide a price point that you don’t. So work with them to say, Hey, you know what, we, if we get a lead and it’s outside of our service area, can we send them your way? There might be two or three of those. The same thing with the price point, you know, oftentimes when you’re working to try to build a home for someone and their budget is, is here and you know, you guys are, are up here and they can’t bridge that gap, you might say, You know what? You really should be buying a used house. And if that’s the case, refer ’em to a realtor. You know, say, Hey, we, we really recommend so and so realtor, they know this area well. And send, send them that way. Or perhaps there’s another builder that you know of that has a community that can hit that price point. Send them over there. You’re never going to regret, regret that because the lead walks away happy. They’re gonna, they’re gonna speak highly of you. And you know what? Maybe put him in the right direction and did him, and did him a favor. So with all, with all that being said, you know, all of you guys have the opportunity to try our lead connector tool and that’s gonna help plug those opportunity leaks on your website. It eliminates interruptions when leads come in, and then you’re gonna stop wasting time chasing bad leads. And that lead connector tool, like I said, for about every 10 leads that come in, roughly seven of them will, will reply and about five of their book and so right away you’re able to. Not have to worry about following up. Don’t have to chase bad leads. So those five that don’t book, they go away. And the five that do book, you’ve got a time on your calendar, you call ’em, finish a qualification process, and see if they’re a good fit for your company.
Daiana: Right?
Rick: What’s next week, Daiana?
Daiana: Next week, we will talk about how to get leads to respond to your follow-up. So that’s, I, I know that a secret that the fortune is in the follow-up. So let’s see how, how we will transform the follow-up into a fortune.
Rick: Yeah, we’ll probably give away some of our secrets here, but that’s okay. So, I thank you for being here today. Every, everybody, and for my brothers and sisters in Christ may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. We will see you next time, next week. Bye guys.
Daiana: Bye. Take care.
Recent Comments