You hear the advice, you know it’s true.
When prospects are bouncing around calling every contractor for a quote, they’re most likely price shopping. And that’s not an ideal lead.
An ideal lead is already sold on the idea of hiring you. BUT, we all know that’s not always going to be the case, and sometimes we choose to work with the price shoppers if the job is right for us.
If you want the job, you gotta answer the phone
Or, they’ll just move on to the next phone number.
But how can you possibly answer every phone call? After all, it’s not like every phone call is a lead anyway.
Worst times the phone call is a waste of your time.
Solicitors, vendors, nit-pickers, friends (huge time wasters), networking opportunities, the list goes on.
Most times these phone calls can be a better use as an email or even a text message.
If you don’t answer, you lose the job
And there’s always that nagging reminder that if you don’t answer, you’ll lose a lead you may have paid good marketing dollars for.
So what are you to do?
Have your spouse answer? (they’ve probably got other things they’d rather do… or, tasks that earn the business more money)
You could hire an office assistant. (but that’s just too expensive than it needs to be sometimes)
Outsource it.
That’s right. Outsource it. NOT to India or the Philippines though. There’s a number of services I’ve helped a client try recently.
He’s a flooring contractor that’s on the road; checking on the team, doing sales calls, meeting with vendors. He’s a busy guy.
His wife is home, answering the calls. This isn’t her full time job. The phone calls aren’t always about business.
He’s utilizing one our services to record calls for sales purposes and lead tracking. So after some time, I mentioned it may be time to move to a service like this.
He agreed, so we investigated a few.
The first one was horrible.
The second was awesome!
For a couple hundred dollars a month, a very professional, polite person (American) answers the phone during normal business hours, M-F.
They take messages, answer simple questions, deter solicitors, and connect you to actual leads and customers that call (or take a message and send an email for your immediate follow up).
It really is the perfect service when you’re constantly on the road and don’t have office staff.
What could you do with all that extra time and stress relief?
(Tomorrow I’ll share with you how we record business calls for lead tracking, sales training and marketing ideas)