Profitable Leads

The No. 1 marketing tool for a remodeler is his reputation. As my father always said, "Do a good job, son, and that customer will tell three people about you; do a bad job, and they will stop everyone in the grocery store and tell them." Dad was right!

For MUI Corp., direct referral and repeat customers comprise 29.22 percent of the total leads for the company and 74.42 percent of the jobs. Guess what? These jobs are also the most profitable. You have probably heard that before, but when you see it in the real numbers, through lead tracking, it makes it more believable.

Because MUI Corp. is 19 years old, we are going to have many leads from other sources. I have learned to spend my time wisely on the type of lead that brings in most of our profitable work. When I am given a choice of which lead to call first, I choose the referral/repeat customer lead. My chances of closing that lead are at least 22 percent higher than with all of the other categories of leads we track.

They say you can make numbers report any statistic you want, but I do not need to do any excessive interpretation of these numbers. For us, we can see it is possible for the number of leads to decrease and still receive three-fourths of our work and profit.

That is indeed a worthwhile note; after all, there are only 24 hours in a day. Anything I can do to help generate additional time is worth pursuing. Because I track leads, I can see where I need to spend most of my time in marketing and selling MUI Corp.

When you consider the amount of time it takes to close any good lead, it makes sense to spend more time where you have a better chance of closing the deal and turning a reasonable profit. At this point, I wish I could tell you I have stopped taking all other leads. But I must be honest and tell you I love landing the ones that others thought I could not land. Besides that, this is how we have built the company into one of the most reputable companies in Birmingham, Ala. I would never want to decrease my leads, yet I want to know where to spend most of my sales time.

My point in this is to get you to think about how you can streamline your sales process. I have learned, only through the numbers, where my best closings and profits are today. Our leads have increased proportionally over the past five years, but our closing ratio has decreased. For the first time in five years, our leads are down. Therefore, we have had to concentrate on sales harder than ever. Now you can see why having the history of our lead tracking has helped us understand the areas to concentrate on for the best return on investment. Once I reviewed the history of the leads received by our company, I could see the most profitable type of potential customer to pursue.

Also See:

Marketing for the Future

Lead Tracking